17 April 2020
Plague in 2020 - A dilemma
Our governments and people are running around like headless chickens chasing Covid19. I am sure there are people in the background who are considering the real problem but they have so far been totally drowned out. The present Covid19 plague has been compared to the 1918 Spanish Flu and it has, indeed, a similar root. That epidemic was created in the foul and disgusting conditions in which men lived for four years in the trenches of World War One. The flu is generally said to have happened after that war but it was actually coincident and a not surprising result of four years of purgatory.
The real problem is the source of the present infection. Where did it come from and is it coming again? There is an answer. Pre-historic hunter-gathers did not have epidemic diseases. If a man or his family or even his tribe caught a bug they might die; most bugs were not deadly. If they did die that would end the infection. End of story. Then men learned to herd animals together and keep them in unnatural conditions. In the wild the excrement of men and animals simply got lost in the bush or jungle and was recycled by a largely benevolent nature. In the farmyard animals lived in their own muck and men lived close alongside them. Several thousand years of our own propaganda has persuaded us that farm animals are 'cuddly'. No they are not; they are filthy disease-ridden infestations. This is not of their own making. In the wild they could automatically control the diseases by death or separation. In the farmyard they have no automatic defence.
The normally relatively harmless microbes and viruses within the animals were prompted by the changes in the conditions of their hosts to mutate and often became more aggressive and more deadly. They also jumped species and further mutated within mankind to produce smallpox, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria and many other endemic diseases that had not afflicted man before this.
This situation existed for around ten thousand years and some men developed immunity to many of the diseases but there were always more. In 1492 Columbus sailed to the New World and in the next 100 years these deadly diseases killed probably 80% of the native Americans. They had never farmed animals and did not have the diseases or immunity to them. They died in their millions.
Then around 1850 advances in science led to vaccines and eventually to antibiotics. By around 1960 all the major diseases had been brought largely under control and we had around 20 years relatively free of disease.
Then around 1975 we started to get an occasional world epidemic of ‘flu’. These were occasional at first but by the end of the millennium they were coming quite regularly. Now they come virtually every month. Most are relatively harmless and not extremely virulent. But now we have one (Covid19) that is so virulent that virtually everybody on earth is going to catch it and its morbidity is not insignificant.
So where do these diseases come from? Around 1975 somebody had the bright idea of herding chickens into intensive battery sheds where they have hardly enough room to move. They live in their own and each other’s waste products and are also fed antibiotics to attempt to keep diseases at bay. This results in the normal germs within the chickens mutating to combat the antibiotics that reduce the effectiveness of these useful medicines throughout the world. It will not be long before antibiotics are of little use. Then the old diseases will re-establish themselves. Far more people will die of these 'old fashioned' diseases than of Covid19.
More importantly the viruses normally resident in the chickens have to mutate to meet the new conditions they find themselves in inside the guts of chickens eating their own crap. The bugs get tougher and eventually one will escape and jump species to man. The tougher the intensive farming gets, the tougher the bugs get and the more dangerous to mankind. The description above is for chickens but can be applied equally to pigs and cows and probably other animals too. Sometimes the bugs can jump to other species which further confuses the issues.
The Covid19 which assails us now has a morbidity rate of only about one percent but it is creating such havoc that the economies of almost all western countries are already severely damaged and will take at least ten years to recover as a best estimate. The economic damage is probably going to be much worse than the medical damage. What if the next bug has a similar virulence but a morbidity of 50% like Ebola? Do not think it will not happen. It is highly likely that it will happen and not in 100 years but next month or next year. Intensive farming is extremely dangerous. The expanding human population is causing many more species to be commonly eaten which has not happened before. Food has gone from supporting mankind to threatening it.
The present situation in the UK is that the health service can adequately deal with around 5000 new cases each day. At this rate it will take 36 years to infect, and perhaps render immune, the whole population. If we can assume that an infection of 60% of the population will render ‘herd immunity’, then that will only take 21 years. Immunity, if it happens at all tends not to last for ever. Unless we get a vaccine we are in for a very long slog. Three weeks of lockdown have brought the economy close to collapse. What will several years do?
After two world wars Britain had to borrow around five and a half billion dollars from the US and Canada to stay financially afloat. We finally paid it back after around 60 years; and that, only because of rampant inflation in the 70's. Today we have already committed around 50 billion pounds to fighting this disease and it has hardly started yet. Even allowing for inflation that is an impressive debt which will afflict the country for generations. And that is in just about six weeks.
There are thousands of laboratories all over the world working hard to find a vaccine but they do not expect to find one in less than a year. In 1918 it is estimated that forty million people died of the Spanish Flu. The current pandemic is likely to kill around two million but is still creating utter havoc. Imagine what a death rate of fifty percent might do. Probably over a billion deaths. Since 1918 our technology has given us medicine, practices, knowledge and equipment that was formerly utterly beyond belief; but it is nearly impotent in the face of one tiny little bug. The laboratories might find a vaccine just in time to be of no use and just as the next, different, virus comes along. The mutation events in the chicken battery houses can produce a new bug every day. Perhaps a billion per day. That is what viruses do.
An enormous effort can enable our medicine to react in one year. The virus can produce its clones at about a billion per day and, once in the population, at a rate of perhaps several quadrillion per hour. Stop pretending we can handle this. We cannot. We must stop it at source. This may only be an early version of an army of similar soldiers.
Now we come a little closer to the dilemma.
Professor James Lovelock developed and published his theory of Gaia. This is his notion of a force that controls the biosphere of our planet and keeps if fit for life. He made his living doing things like teaching NASA how to look for life on Mars and almost single-handedly discovering the hole in the ozone layer which threatens to fry us all alive. He is a man to listen to. The professor seemed a little hesitant about the correctness of the controls which he proposes; I spent my life learning, designing, manufacturing and using, servicing and repairing servo-systems. These are the systems which control all the devices which appear to act like magic around you controlling anything you desire - almost. The equations, methods and techniques of servo-systems coincide almost exactly with what the professor hypothesises for Gaia.
Gaia is not a thing or an entity; it is a concept. It recognises that we do not know enough about our world and its ways to understand all that happens. In engineering when we have a problem we do not understand there is an analysis method called 'Black Box'. You pretend the problem is inside a black box closed to you. All you know is its inputs and outputs. A great deal can sometimes be learned by this and it can be applied to many types of problem. Imagine that the earth system is a black box. We do not know in detail how it works but we can define some of its inputs and some of its outputs. Thus we can learn a lot. Our black box we call Gaia.
It is almost impossible to simulate the system of Gaia. The most powerful computers on earth are used to calculate the patterns of our weather. They do a very good job but there are hundreds or thousands or perhaps millions of sub-systems which each play a part in maintaining the planet. Gaia has operated these with overall success for around a billion years. It is a brave and foolish man, indeed, who would pretend to compete with that. But that is what we are doing.
Since the advent of easily available computing power we have been able to test ideas about chaos and complexity which were previously no-go areas. We now know that relatively simple systems can have very complex behaviour and more complex systems produce results which depend upon almost infinitely small changes in conditions. It is virtually impossible to predict what is going to happen. Yet Gaia has managed to keep this infinitely complex system of gasses and water and the ninety two elements in balance for around four billion years. We mess with it at our peril.
One of the things that has impressed and frightened some of us is the graph which describes the progress of Covid19. It is called an exponential and after a slow start it shoots upwards at very high speed. Take a look at a similar graph of the number of people on earth and we have dragged onward for about a million years. In the last two hundred years we have shot upwards at breakneck, frightening and stupid speed. Just like a virus. The virus attacks us; we are attacking the planet. We are attacking Gaia and Gaia will have the last word and maybe the last laugh.
And this is the dilemma. If we address the virus problem successfully we will overpopulate the earth very quickly. It is already showing signs of stress with global warming and dirty oceans and species loss and a host of similar problems. Gaia will then close us down in some way. Maybe we will simply roast to death. Maybe we will die in our own poisons. Maybe the bugs will kill us.
If we do not address the viruses then they will create a major crash within our society. Gaia will allow the chickens to get their own back. Either way we are damned. If we fight Gaia and lose she will seriously reduce us. If we fight and win we shall destroy ourselves and perhaps Gaia as well.
Our only hope is to stop intensive farming and to much reduce the population of the world and our rape of the planet and its resources. You may think Gaia is a fanciful construction but can you afford to take that risk? It’s your life at stake. The whole of mankind is at stake. Gaia will probably survive. Man might not. Copvid19 might just be a shot across our bow. Take note.
The graph above shows the current (April 2020) progress of the Covid19 virus in the UK. Notice how it begins to shoot upwards until its speed is enormous. Eventually it will run out of victims and start to slow down; but not before it has infected a huge portion of the population. This is what pestilential bugs do . They use the power of the exponential to create havoc and sometimes death.
The graph below shows the current progress of the human population infesting the earth. The steepness of its progress makes the Covid19 virus look positively pedestrian. We are behaving just like a nasty invasion of a killer virus. The Chinese government recognised this problem forty years ago and instituted a ’one child’ policy. It has been abandoned; presumably because the propensity of people to procreate seems to know no bounds.
It is a safe bet that the lockdown will result in a baby boom at the end of this year that will far more than replace the lives lost to Covid19. This is mainly a cull of the aged with replacement by babies.
Homo Sapiens?( I think Homo Erectus would be a far better description and epitaph )
We are killing our only home. We created a hole in the ozone which could have fried us. We are heating up the atmosphere which is changing the weather and increasing the severity of storms and hurricanes. We are fouling our beaches, rivers and oceans with thousands of tons of muck, plastics and poisons. We are melting the ice caps and risking a permanent change in the heat balance of the world. We are fouling our farmland and our own food with chemical poisons. We have destroyed up to eighty percent of our insects. We are destroying species faster than the dinosaur catastrophe did. We are destroying the quality of the air we breathe. We are poisoning ourselves and creating hundreds of new ailments. This list could fill several books. Now the chickens are telling us they have had enough. When are we going to listen? Are we so stupid that even chickens know better than us? If we do not stop this ridiculous behaviour Gaia will surely stop it for us.
Our correct response to this plague should be to embrace it and recognise it is performing a necessary cleansing of the planet. We should give all people all the facts that we can and good advice on how to avoid it. Don’t fly or go on cruise ships, don’t mix with other people who might cough or even breathe over you. Don’t do silly things which might cause you to end up in A&E. Go about your daily life creating wealth in whatever way you normally and legally can. Social distance and if you can afford it stay at home. You would be wise to get plenty of pain killers. Get and wear whatever protective equipment you can.
The hospitals should not be geared up to treat millions. The bug takes the weakest. This is the inevitable law of Gaia which has ruled this planet for around a billion years. It knows what it is doing. Embrace it, don’t fight it. You think my advice is wicked? You ain’t seen nothin yet.
You can shake your head and wail and take comfort in pretending I’m a nasty heathen wishing to kill my fellow citizens. You are free to ignore my words but you are not free to escape the consequences of your ignorance. If this one doesn't’t get you then the next one will. Or the one after that. Man is not the victim in this scenario. Man is the problem.One alternative scenario is that we shall defeat this particular bug and resume global warming and end up like Venus with an atmosphere of sulphuric acid at a temperature of 350 degrees and utterly lifeless. That’s a nice way to go. You think I have got it wrong? Prove it. The Venusians probably didn't see it coming either.
James Ricards in The Road to Ruin describes how modern mathematics based upon computing power can describe some of the behaviour of complex systems such as the financial markets or the occurrence of epidemics. Some of the techniques were first developed to enable design of the first atomic bomb. The basic message is that as our society gets more complex and dense so the potential for catastrophe increases exponentially and, to the average punter, in very mysterious ways. There is little doubt that we are headed for a major disaster unless we mend our ways. It could be already far too late. If that is so then the next disaster will make this one look like a village green tea party.
As a private individual there is little you can do besides prepare to hunker down as best you might. In the meantime start screaming and shouting at your democratic representatives. Join a protest group. Write. Shout. Scream. It’s your world we are destroying. Stop jetting off round the world. Stop going on cruises. Stop using your car unnecessarily. Stop eating intensively reared meat. Stop heating your house too much. Stop heating your office or workplace. Stop supporting anything which uses energy. Demand a policy to reduce population. Demand that every other country does this too. Demand we stop making endless conveyers of goods with short lives and doubtful usefulness. Forsake hedonism. Change almost everything you do. Can’t do these things? Then prepare for death. Lots of it.
In centuries past, when man first began to create plagues, the kings and priest used the opportunity to increase their power by warning the ignorant serfs and slaves that God had brought a plague down upon their heads for some imagined sin. Now we know differently. Now we know that we are bringing this plague down on our heads by our stupid hedonistic behaviour that considers that everything we can touch owes us a profit. Our conceit rules our world and knows no bounds. We have forgotten we live in a world which is finite and bounded. We have forgotten that we are a child of that world, not its master. We have ignored the warning signs which have been many. We think we are invincible. We have forgotten we share the planet with millions of other life-forms mostly based on the same genes as us. If our plunder is causing the death of many of our fellow species, what on earth makes us think it won’t kill us? Stupidity or inertia or pure evil?
There is another matter which will not have escaped the attention of many people; mainly those who seek to enhance their own power just as ancient priests and kings did. Those who created this virus can never be blamed for the devastation it has caused. The first paragraph of this story showed how nasty viruses are the product of man’s unwise farming practices. Proving a particular source may well be impossible due to the nature of complexity. In short, it is very easy to hide the source. It is relatively easy to create a nasty virus. You only have to start an intensive animal farm and before too long you will have a virus. Preparing it for transmission to the world might be a little more difficult and it will be difficult to exclude yourself from its depredations. But terrorists have been doing this for over half a century. They do not care whether they live of die. This is potentially a weapon much more effective than the hydrogen bomb. It is easy to make; It is hard to detect; it will destroy a large number of your enemies as well as your friends and it will destroy the economies of everybody. And it will leave the world relatively empty to be repopulated by the strongest survivors. The ultimate terror weapon. So you can expect a repeat of this pandemic quite often.
5th May 2020
There is, of course, the possibility that this virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan. If is escaped from the laboratory whether by accident or design is really irrelevant. When the virus started making local people ill the Chinese government panicked and decided they had better stop this thing which might prove extremely virulent. Whether it was manufactured deliberately or by accident was not relevant. The Chinese authoritarian government used their near absolute powers to impose a lockdown on their people. We all watched with distant and almost detached interest. Then it spread to a cruise ship and very shortly across the world.
World leaders have learned a strong lesson. Firstly, how you can attack your enemies without them even knowing it. Secondly, how you can impose draconian imprisonment upon your own citizens with their consent. These are dreams that bad men have had for thousands of years. And suddenly they have come true. One of the most authoritarian governments on earth has taught everybody else how to do it. And the pupils have lapped it up.
From the end of WW2 75 years ago this week, in Europe, the world was ruled by a relatively benign United States which had taken over policing the world from the British Empire. American resources and open spaces made that inevitable. It was the price Britain paid for American help in taming Germany and destroying Hitler. In this new world order we fought a Cold War which was a stand-off between The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and NATO. Eventually a form of peaceful co-existence was established which involved Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD. We have learned to live with it but it is still a daily reality in the air over and around Europe. Soviet bombers and NATO fighters confront each other daily. It hasn't’t gone away. We have just got used to it. I have little doubt we probe their defenses also.
During that three quarters of a century we in the West had a society which was based upon the essentially capitalist power-house set up in 1940 to produce the weapons needed to defeat Hitler and the Japanese. At this America was supremely competent and that competence continued for most of the period to take us to the moon and to give mankind a significant presence in near space. Most Americans got richer each year and their wealth spread to many places around the world by the osmosis of trade. We won the Cold War without firing a shot. We out-performed the USSR financially and bankrupted them. Unfortunately we still have MAD to confront us.
Then around 1990 the computer, which had been born in Bletchley Park as a tool of war in 1943, came of age and began to be a commonly held piece of equipment. Its power was available to all. Now it is impossible to imagine life without it. As a parallel illustration one can recall the laser. In 1963 there was an article in New Scientist which described this new and interesting device and concluded, “This is a solution looking for a problem”. Now there is hardly a device in our society which does not use a laser in some form. Our computers have become nearly as ubiquitous.
In 1973 I worked for a major British car manufacturer. In a meeting one day a problem arose and I suggested a simple piece of electronics could solve the problem. There was a sharp intake of breath all around the table and the idea was dismissed instantly. Now the average car has between ten and fifty computers on board. The computer has changed the way we live in our world and it has created massive divisions between people as well as connecting them in ways not before seen. The advantages are seen in communication and entertainment simply never before available. The schisms are in the vast amount of wealth which has accrued to a very small number of privileged and powerful people.It is extremely hard to argue against the accrual of wealth to those who create it with good ideas and useful products but the ratio of reward to effort seems to have become exceedingly distorted. One might even accept this but it has lead to an oligarchy which exercises enormous power and threatens to turn our society from a neo-democracy into an authoritarian tyranny. Money controls everything and, with the aid of the internet, all of our politics and authority. Democracy in its former sense has almost ceased to exist.
Almost all governments in the world have been experimenting with chemical and germ warfare over the last 75 years. Now they have had an excellent lesson in how their knowledge can be used to cause havoc and enslave their own citizens. This is a bad day indeed. You can expect to hear a lot more from bugs in the future.
Of course, one could always adopt the position that a pandemic is simply Gaia cleansing the planet and let it get on with it. That would serve the cause of freedom much better than the present shambles. We could argue for ever about these matters but at the end of the day we will do what Gaia wants or we shall all die. The notion that we can continue to run this planet the way we are is profoundly conceited and utterly stupid.
If you were Gaia, or God or Allah or whatever and you had worked on this project for around a billion years with lots of setbacks but mostly great success and one of your protoges started to behave badly by over-breeding and damaging the planet by pumping out far too much carbon dioxide and raping the natural resource you had been so careful to conserve, what would you do? Zap the bastard. That is what Gaia is doing to us. Read, learn and inwardly digest. Or die.
further reading
Prof. James Lovelock. Gaia hypothesis. Various books.
The Road to Ruin. James Ricards. Penguin Random House.
Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond. Random House.
The Selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press.
Daylight Robbery. Dominic Frisby. Penguin Random House.
Dr Greger. The Humane Society of the United States. 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se9yqWNIG8A&feature=youtu.be
25 May 2020
It is nearly six weeks since I wrote the above article. I have just re-read it and made a few minor alterations and minor additions; but basically I see nothing to change.
Some people think the world is going to return to its former ways and the politicians are not disabusing them. They dare not; and, indeed, they do not know what is going to happen.
Cruises used to be seen as a means to health and well being. Now a cruise ship will be seen as a short route to disease, sickness and possible death. Cross that off your bucket list.
I gave up airliners three years ago when I finally admitted that virtually every flight I have ever made gave me a sore throat or a cold. Airliners use to be built with 100% fresh air circulation. Now they re-circulate 50% of the cabin air to save energy, and increase profits, and admit their air filters are not maintained well if at all. That's another one off my bucket list; and yours if you have any sense.
Sell your shares in airlines and airports, Boeing, Airbus and Rolls Royce. Keep BAE as they make weapons of war. A huge number of serious wrongs have been done this year and there may well be repercussions.
Restaurants are going to become very different places with social distancing the norm perhaps for years to come. Many will not survive.
Public transport is going to be problematic as social distancing is likely to be with us for a long time. Running services with ten of even twenty percent loading will not be profitable. The political left wing will demand nationalisation and 'free' transport but every socialist enterprise ever formed has died a natural death from indolence and bankrupted taxpayers.
A weekly shop has already become a hazardous enterprise and is unlikely to get better. Food shopping on-line has a long way to go. I have found it. so far, impossible.
One winner from this will be authoritarian government. They will at last be able to get rid of the cash they have sought to destroy for the last twenty years. They have sought this to eliminate the 'grey' economy and make sure everybody comes within their tax regimes. The simple fact that taxes are actually illegal and immoral has been totally swept under the carpet in the name of exigency. The authorities have ensured that everybody has to register all their facts with them in order to benefit from the furlough strategy. Their benefits are paid by the tax collectors who will therefore be in receipt of a huge amount of personal data they might not previously have had the means or authority to collect. That data will never be destroyed whatever promises the government might make and they probably will not even bother to promise that. The fact that hmrc has been given this enormous power of interrogation is not a matter of chance.
The loser is you; citizen of the UK. You live in a country which has striven for nearly a thousand years to institute freedom amongst men. The largest and most authoritarian regime on earth has probably sent this virus to attack us, whether by design or mistake we know not, and has also sent us its authoritarianism as a direct result of the fight against the disease. Now any government on earth can institute whatever silly, disgusting, immoral or illegal restraint it pleases against its citizens with perfunctory excuse and even the approval of the dispossessed people. This is the biggest backward step ever witnessed in the rights of man. You are now a slave. You don't believe me? Try and break the shackles.
One thing is certain. We are not going back to where we were before. Just where we are going is impossible to say with certainty.
30 may 2020
So the pandemic continues and the US burns. The leader of the Western World is showing himself to be a complete Twit but my attention has been elsewhere. I have just read a book 'The secret life of Trees' by Colin Tudge. We have been told endlessly how the Amazon jungle is the life-giving oxygenator of the planet. This is no doubt true but the trees also perform several thousand other functions, perhaps millions. Colin Tudge's descriptions are superb and describe the intimate internal workings of plants and their relationships with other plants, trees, neighbours, animals, insects, viruses and a range of underground stuff I am only just beginning to understand. They manipulate virtually every element in the periodic table and make a huge range of materials which they use and even misuse when necessary.
Their complexity is astounding and the effects upon their, and our, environment highly significant. They are a highly significant factor in the operation of Gaia which, you should know by now, I consider a very apt description of the way this planet manages itself. The plants are far more significant that the relatively puny efforts and effects of animals. At least, this was true until man invented the internal combustion engine and recycled several hundred million years worth of stored carbon and invented the hamburger and bred millions of cows to fart too much methane.
I have hinted above that Covid19 might just be nature's way of getting rid of its biggest problem: Too many men. I am now convinced that there will be a massive population crash and it will not be pretty. Maybe this pandemic is just Gaia being pleasant and giving us a foretaste. There is, of course, little or no 'scientific' evidence to prove what I say. But I have spent a lifetime as a Chartered Engineer taking the information from science and using it to create saleable products. That has taught me a great deal about life and the universe and how to detect a story. And I stand by my judgment. We are going to be taught a hell of a lesson.
Further reading
The Secret Life of Trees. Colin Tudge. Penguin Books.