Survival of Titanic

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Survival of Titanic

Paris, December 26th, 2009

As an old African pedologist, the death and destruction of all forms of life is not understood as a catastrophe but a new beginning. Of course we miss the trilobites.

As I am a human going into the run-up to the goal post, looking back, one regrets that the Animal called Human found a way to survive and regretfully to survive forever. Even if all life on earth was destroyed by some total extinction event, our DNA is already floating in Space. It is ironic to consider that the main consequence of our Space flights has been to disperse astronauts urine in Space.

Whatever qualities the human race has, its main condemnation as a project is that this race will set its survival above all other priorities, which bodes badly for Worlds we may invade in Universe.

In the meantime we have to manage SS Earth and make it as endurable as we can.

A fallacy is to fight teeth and claws to proclaim either that global warming is a plausible hypothesis or a red herring. This is not the basic question.

Let us consider a barge floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If this barge is equipped with a water filtering equipment, all passengers marooned on that barge can have as much water to drink as they want. They can even get drinkable water to wash excrements, a strange human habit that has always perplexed observers from Distant worlds.

If the barge does not have a water producing facility, resources will have to be rationed. With the likely result that the strong ones will take the power and let the weak ones die of thirst. With the amusing consequence that there will be nobody left to man the oars. (do you have oars on a barge?)

Gandhi is quoted as saying that the resources of the Earth are sufficient for the needs of the living, not for the limitless greed of the humans.

As an agronomist I do not worry at all about feeding the World, this is not a problem for us, we did it in the sixties when the doomsday prophets told us stories about the starving India. I was one of these prophets.

As an agronomist I worry about the vanishing clean air and clean water. I have many times wondered why cars pay for fuel and not the clean air consumed.

The idea that we as humans would agree on a rationing system is a dream, we will of course fight one another, even in death camps when death was a day away, the prisoners would fight for any small favour that would by them a reprieve, however short that reprieve would be.

The real fight is not whether Governments will agree on a pollution limiting scheme, they will not.

So does it mean that I am totally pessimistic?

Not really, something could happen, like the Spanish flue but at a World Scale. Something could happen, like finding the obvious answer, transforming coal into diamonds, coal into salads.

Remember the old Middle East story. A rich Ruler had the most beautiful diamond with a flaw. All majors experts were called in and gave up, a flaw is a flax, until a poor unknown diamond cutter, took the flawed diamond and made the flax into the stem of a rose.

In the meantime we can act individually. It is not a curse that we wash with great care one pound of excrement s with one gallon of drinkable water, we can recycle excrements, this was done in Sweden as something natural in the years 1930-40.

We do not need to pay huge amounts of clean air to get rid of our garbage. Incidentally, what is garbage?

Well, even on that I am not too optimist, in Zambia we dug deep holes to get rid of our non decomposable garbage. Is that something awful we did or will Nature fin a way to transform our Heinz baked bean tines into wealth?

Something will happen, everything we believed in the sixties proved to be wrong. In the meantime let us each in is own garden tend to Father Earth.

As the Titanic was steaming towards New York, a machine room crew discovered that there was a hole in the hull, a hole that was getting bigger and bigger.

The Captain, made aware of the situation by his Chinese Second in command, realized that such a hole could only be contained if all the passengers gave their metals, be it gold, lead or copper, metal which would be welded into a plate that would be plated upon the hole in the leak

The lower deck crew was ordered first to surrender all their meagre belongings and they pointed out quite rightly that with what they possessed you could not make an armour plate larger than a handkerchief.

The Higher Ranking Crew when asked pointed out that everything they had was property of the Company and that willing as they were to make sacrifice, they could not surrender which was not theirs

The Captain then addressed the passengers; First class passengers were horrified and rushed to the cable room to send aggressive telegrams demanding the dismissal on the spot of the Captain and preferably that he should made to walk the plank. Who could blame them? They had paid for a fare from London to New-York with hard earned money earned by their beloved grand-grand-father and now their rights were trampled and obscene demands put on them.

Third class passengers, those parked in the holds were more than willing to contribute rags an d sweat but told that regretfully this would not sufficient

In the meantime the hole was getting bigger, and the First Class passenger complained bitterly that there was not enough tortoise taste in the soup and that they were incommode by the leaning of the ship and ordered the Captain to shift the hold scum to the other side of the ship so that they could enjoy their rightful rights to a luxury travel. How would they be expected to dance if the dance floor was leaning?

As the hole in the hulk was getting bigger and bigger the ship was slowed down and never even noticed the iceberg floating in the darkness on the starboard.

Finally, the ship arrived in New York, the corpses of the drowned machine room members and third class passengers that had been drowned were very discreetly disembarked.

The Capture never set his foot again on the bridge of a ship.

The first class passengers were so upset, they had to recruit new maids and servants to replace those that had been drowned.