Aug 20, 2020
A Contrarian Speaks: 2019-nCoV
Shouldn’t we just get along? Or does this mean war?
Speaking as a covid survivor (barely survived), as a scientist, and as someone intolerant of human denial and stupidity, I have to raise the point:
Isn’t Covid-19 exactly the sort of disease the human race needs right now?
- Why do I call it 2019-nCoV?
Because when I contracted it in January 2020, it didn’t have the fancy name or gorgeous photos yet.
Coronaviruses are irregular blobby shapes and are black-and-white in images because the entire virus is far smaller than one wavelength of, for example, red light.
If someone, say a government agency, should display a perfectly round, perfectly in-focus, red sphere of death — beware. You’d be getting manipulated in the worst way: they’d be using the media to create abject fear and terror in the populace.
I’ve earned the right to be a little bit rude like this. I didn’t yet know much about coronavirus, not then, but I was about to start learning. I was really sick, but I did what I’d always done as a kid with a horrible flu. I stayed in bed and didn’t get up. One night in January 2020 I woke up unable to breathe. (I wasn’t dumb enough to be in a hospital — who’d want to die with all that beeping and bright lights?)
I had to stick two fingers down my throat and I pulled up this weird-looking sheet of perfectly clear phlegm. I think it was a sloughed-off layer of dead lung cells. I learned that bit of trivia more recently.
The next night was beyond weird.
I woke up again not breathing, but also . . . everything was dead silent. My heart had stopped! I remember the silence and how everything was like black velvet. Realizing that I was technically dead, I instantly got pissed off. And then my heart restarted. Whew!
2. Why the hell do you say the human race needs Covid-19 right now?
I didn’t. I said that the human race needs this sort of disease. Covid-19 isn’t any more deadly than a bad flu epidemic. It’s far less deadly than the Ebola and other viruses like HIV/AIDS or TB that are currently killing large numbers of people.
But the reason we need viruses and other plagues is the same reason we always have — at least for a few hundred-thousand (or million) years. Natural selection. Thinning down overpopulation. Those kinds of reasons. Better than wars, genocide, or eugenics, right?
And it may sound strange, but we need periodic invasions of viruses and bacteria for our health. A significant part of our DNA is actually from ancient viruses that basically reached an uneasy truce with our bodies. And as for the mitochondria powering our very cells — they are actually engulfed bacteria. They are likely ancient organisms — we still haven’t actually figured out where they came from. What doesn’t kill us can make us stronger.
3. You still make no sense. Why would we want a disease that’s miserable and kills us?
When an organism expands in number until it overstresses its own environment, which is called overshoot, it necessarily experiences a major die-off.
People largely ignore these die-offs when they are ants or rats, or the yeasts used for baking bread or brewing beer. They might be somewhat disturbed by lemmings plunging off a cliff. The more human-like an organism is, the more uneasy people get when considering its death. Think about kittens. Right? But sometimes feral cats overshoot in population — kittens die.
Wait!
Before you ask question 4, let me anticipate and answer it.
Listen!
I was born in 1953. When you look at a graph of global human population history, you’ll see a little dip right at 1953, and then a steep climb towards our present population of 7.8 billion. In 1953 the population was 2.7 billion — a third of the present (and more urbanized) population.
Look!
Never mind the stupid damned list. I’ve changed my mind. You people are pissing me off.
See those spirals in the picture to the left? Those depict the human race heading for the big bang, or more accurately, the big crunch. Is this just a theory? Well, of course it is. It hasn’t happened yet. But there are a few clues. Covid-19 is a big, wake-up clue. The fat cats — oligarchs or oil barons, are fleeing to higher ground. You can’t get close to them even if you do wear a mask. And they’re spending serious money on spaceships. Why?
Because they know that they’ve poisoned the Earth. They don’t care at all about the huddled, masked masses. They’re nailing their colours to the mast of A.I. What? Well, it’s true. They want to be serviced by intelligent robots. They aren’t really going to move to Mars! They’re going to let their minions do so, so that after the rest of humanity has died off, they’ll still have a colony somewhere that can worship their prescience, their wisdom. These wealthy fat-cats will be living in their luxury bunkers, on Earth, far away from the crowded cities being submerged by rising oceans.
Thing is . . . we climate and environmental scientists figured this all out — in the 1950s, ’60s . . . and finally in the 1990s, when we knew we were at our last-chance tipping point. We tried to warn you. Nobody listened. Nobody but the big-oil oligarchs, who sabotaged us with disinformation.
These Kids Weren’t Wearing Their Stupid Masks
But in the scheme of things, do you still think Covid-19 is your biggest threat?
Am I absolutely certain that everything I’ve claimed in this article is correct?
Well, to be honest, I’d have to say, “Yes.”
Maybe Fred lost his mind to Covid-19. It happens. But I’ve recovered — I’ve even gained ground. Perhaps a bit more gruntled than before. Live and learn.
FSE
