“Salutations to Mother Earth;
In Her is woven together ocean and river waters;
In Her is contained food, which she manifests when ploughed.
In Her, indeed, is alive all lives;
may she bestow us with that life.”
- Bhoomi Sukta (Praises to Mother Earth), Atharva Veda
My earliest recollections of my father performing a Vedic prayer in the presence of a priest is of him offering respect to his mother and to Mother Earth. I remember the priest telling all of us that no act of worship can be fruitful without offering respect to both the biological mother and Mother Earth, which must be performed at the outset of each act of worship.
The significance of this ritual and gesture only completely dawned on me in recent years. In the very least this was meant to inculcate family and social values in us, but most importantly this was intended to orient us to the importance of protecting and preserving our Earth, which, like our mothers, provides us resources critical to our collective sustenance and progress!
Needless to say, the foresight and the timeless pertinence of the wisdom within The Manuals of the Cosmos™ are beyond amazing, given that according to current (though predominantly Western) thought, Vedic literature was composed millennia before any significant civilizations existed!!!
As the environmental wars rage, it becomes increasingly clear that we have been repeatedly insulting and abusing Mother Earth in the name of science and progress. Now the chickens are, unfortunately, coming home to roost, for instance, as global warming and its consequences loom large! Hurricane Ian, with all its historic devastation, is the latest reminder!!
With NASA’s most recent project, Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), our scientists apparently performed an experiment testing our ability to avert a collision from an oncoming asteroid from outer space that could possibly destroy part or all of humanity. I must confess, I have a gnawing premonition that application of some form of this technique will be used in future Star Wars like scenarios.
Moreover, the American government recently announced the theme song of the latest branch of the U.S. military, the Space Force, which was established on December 20, 2019. While DART seeks to abort any inanimate, physical danger coming to Earth from outer space, the U.S. Space Force ostensibly plans to counter any “intelligent” military activities perpetrated in and from outer space.
Now, let’s examine the odds of risk to Mother Earth and to humanity from without versus within.
NASA has an elaborate system in place to monitor the movements of near-earth objects (NEOs) as part of their Near-Earth Object Surveyor project. It should be noted that not a single human on Earth has been killed by an NEO in the last several thousand years. Modern science believes that the last time life on Earth was obliterated by an asteroid was about 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs became extinct. According to NASA, the odds of our planet getting smashed by an asteroid of similar size and effect in the near future is about 0.000001%!
NASA uses the Torino scale (1-10) for all NEOs to rate the likelihood of collision with Earth - a rating of 1 denotes least likely and that of 10 most likely. Do you know what is the highest rating for any NEO at this point? It is a whopping one!
Furthermore, according to NASA the NEO “Bennu” is of greatest concern, being the most likely to collide with Earth in the “near future” - the odds of which are only one in 1,750 (0.0037%) of doing so in the next three centuries! Conversely, that leaves over a 99.9% chance that Bennu will not hit Earth in the next three centuries!!!
While it may sound glamorous and macho to save the Earth from an asteroid by blasting it like Bruce Willis in the film Armageddon, or hitting it with considerable force to change its trajectory as intended by the DART project, these exercises are not likely to make our Earth much safer in the near future.
Shall we now talk about the risks posed to earth from nuclear weapons?
As current events in the Ukrainian conflict demonstrate, the dictum of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is not likely to work now or in the future. The doctrine of MAD states that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second strike capabilities would cause complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. In fact, the concept of Self-Assured Destruction (SAD), which is now gaining favor, considers the scenario where the use of full-scale nuclear weapons by an attacker, even in absence of any retaliation, would result in annihilation of the attacker and the rest of the world. SAD, indeed!
While our scientists devise increasingly lethal weapons, nuclear or otherwise, the likelihood of these weapons being used by someone do not necessarily decrease. Therefore, increasing lethality of weapons makes our planet less safe. In this context, formation of the Space Force by the U.S. is more likely to escalate military competition on Earth as well as extend it into outer space - thus being unlikely to enhance our safety, from threats within or without.
A pool of experts at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute estimated in July of 2008 that the risk of complete human extinction is about one percent within the next century, while the risk of one billion human deaths during the same timeframe is about 10%, and the risk of one million human deaths is about 30%.
In a paper published by Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor at Harvard University and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, he points out that last year under the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons only 86 of the 195 countries involved were signatories. But get this! None of the world’s nine nuclear-weapon states participated!
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that in 2021 our Earth was home to just over 13,000 nuclear weapons. I regret to tell you that the number and lethality of these weapons are only amplifying.
The online paper titled “Samotsvety Nuclear Risk Forecast,” published in March of 2022 on the Effective Altruism Forum, estimates the risk of Russia attacking London with nuclear missiles before February of 2023 to be 0.8%.
Graham Allison, another Harvard professor, estimates the odds of a nuclear war in the near future as between 0.1% to 1%.
It is exceedingly clear that Mother Earth and humanity are facing much greater risks from within than from without.
“There are two problems for our species' survival -
nuclear war and environmental catastrophe -
and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.”
- Noam Chomsky (Linguist, philosopher, and essayist)
It is worth mentioning that the earliest descriptions of asteroids, meteorites, and comets come from Vedanga Jyotisha, which roughly translates into “the Science or Knowledge of Heavenly Bodies,” a part of Rig Veda - which, based on the balance of latest research, was composed at least 10,000 years ago.
The ancient Indian epic of Mahabharata, “the Great War of Bharat,” depicted the largest war ever fought on Earth according to Indian thought. Based on the latest research this event occurred between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. In the text, there are vivid and granular descriptions of weapons of mass destruction, some of which are claimed to have caused devastation similar to that caused by most advanced weapons of today.
However, the most central character of Mahabharata, Lord Krishna, was described to have abolished and banished all weapons of mass destruction at the end of the war for the sake of posterity. Our current political and scientific communities ought to take a page out of this timeless Indian epic!
As I have mentioned before, the Vedas and other ancient texts of Bharat, collectively referred to in my blogs as The Manuals of the Cosmos, offer humanity - as clear as a bell - the most conducive ways to exist on Mother Earth, in harmony with ourselves and with the Cosmos.
The dedication of an entire sub-book named Bhoomi Sukta in one of the four Vedas, the Atharva Veda (quoted at the start of this blog), is meant to extol the selfless virtues of Mother Earth, thus embodying ethos which are critical to the survival of our humanity.
The bell is tolling!
And that’s all, folks…
At least for now…
Until next time…
“Mother Earth is my first guru.
She taught me to hold those who trample me, scratch me, and hurt me,
lovingly in my heart, just as she does.
She taught me to give them my best,
remembering that their acts are normal and natural from their standpoint.”
- Dattatreya, Atharva Veda
Please hit the "love button" at the bottom of the page if you enjoyed this post! ❤️
Comentarios