Unconscious
by Juan Torres López: Imagine that a ship manned by beings from another intelligent civilization (different from ours, therefore) approaches Earth to know its nature and how its inhabitants live.
They quickly discover that a virus has spread there, infecting millions of people and causing tens of thousands of deaths, in almost all places and many more than those recorded by the statistics to which they have access, thanks to their knowledge and technology. , far superior to those on Earth.
To know the most concrete situation, the effects that the epidemic is really having and the measures that these humans are carrying out to alleviate them, they decide to go to the highest authority of the highest economic, military, cultural and political power on that planet, the United States President Donald Trump. Just when they are going to get in contact with him, he is giving a press conference in which he proposes to inject disinfectant and light into the bodies of the people affected as a way to finish him off. Incredulous, visitors then decide to turn to other sources of knowledge.
They later prove that, at the beginning of the epidemic, all the planet's leaders and governments had dismissed it as important, but that now, without exception, they regard it with suffocation and consider it to be in great danger. They already know that it is a global evil, the expansion of which cannot be stopped through physical borders, and that global action would be required to be able to face it with some success, for example, sharing health resources, investigating the obtaining of vaccines as a team. or by making available to each other the knowledge and material, personal or financial means necessary to avoid a catastrophe.
The visitors, however, verify that there has not been any type of global meeting because the institutions where all the countries of the planet used to sit without exception, such as the United Nations, have long been devalued and have little influence on the decisions of the most powerful countries. Furthermore, the president of the great world power had decided that his country (the richest on the planet) should stop contributing and collaborating, precisely at that time, with his office dedicated to fighting this type of health disaster, the World Organization of the Health.
Extraterrestrial visitors cannot explain the behavior of Earth humans in terms of viral prevention. Scientists on that planet know that there are more than 300,000 viruses that could produce an effect similar to or worse than Covid-19, and despite this, their governments continue to leave the discovery of vaccines and remedies in the hands of private laboratories, the which, logically, will only try to discover what is profitable to their own businesses and not to the general interest. The situation of sanitary disarmament seems as incredible as it is absurd. They cannot understand that the United States dedicates almost 600,000 million euros to military spending and then it turns out that 80% of the medicines consumed in its interior come from China, which is supposed to be one of the adversaries that justify such a military waste.
Visitors are especially surprised by this lack of global collaboration when they realize that global food supply chains are giving way, something that has been highlighted, among many other researchers, by an economist serving the FAO, the office of the United Nations dedicated to food problems, in an article published in the journal Nature. Here are some examples of what is actually happening across the country: “In India, farmers are feeding strawberries to cows because they cannot transport the fruit to city markets. In Peru, producers are pouring tons of white cocoa into the landfill because the restaurants and hotels that would normally buy it are closed. And in the United States and Canada, farmers had to dump milk for the same reason. Legions of migrant workers from Eastern Europe and North Africa are trapped at the borders, rather than harvesting on farms in France, Germany and Italy. The United States, Canada and Australia rely heavily on temporary farm workers who are unable to travel due to virus restrictions. " And it is also noted in that article that fear of the pandemic has produced very dangerous "chaotic chain reactions" that have already pushed up the prices of basic foodstuffs, such as wheat (8% compared to those of March last year) or rice
(25%).
This information makes visitors interested in hunger and also discover that it affects 821 million people, despite the fact that only food products that are wasted around the planet could feed 1,260 million human beings every year. . When they analyze the way humans on Earth organize the production and consumption of the basic products they need, visitors are greatly surprised at the great damage they cause to their natural environment and, in turn, at the enormous cost that This carries with it both money and human lives.
Thus, air pollution kills seven million people every year and natural disasters caused by the climate some 600,000. 40% of the world population already has problems with water scarcity and every year 2.2 million people die from simple diarrhea. As a consequence of much of the existing way of life on Earth, sea level has risen twice as expected in the last 25 years, a third of marine species are at risk from climate change, the ice sheets that They cover the Earth's surface are thawing 20% more than expected by scientists and that of the Arctic has decreased by 40% in the last 35 years. Deforestation (which produces a fifth of the CO2 emissions that destroy the Earth) progresses at a rate of 13 million hectares each year (almost a quarter of Spain). At the rate in which it is produced and consumed on the planet they are going to visit, in 2050 some 4 billion people will live in desertified lands and resistance to antibiotics, caused among other causes by pollutants poured into water and food, It will be the first cause of death in the world that year.
Visitors are confused by the strange economic way in which the inhabitants of the Earth face these problems since it is calculated that they could be avoided with 19.5 billion euros, while the cost of supporting them amounts to 47 billion. And it is also incomprehensible to them that the current inhabitants of the Earth do not take into account that after those who live there now, other future generations will have to come, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whose well-being and way of life do not seem to worry them. Although they are also surprised by the lack of care they take with children, as the UNICEF Humanitarian Action for Children 2019 report, which they have consulted, pointed out, "children suffer the greatest threat to their development in the last 30 years." Something that also perplexes the aliens, because that report indicates that it would only take 3.5 billion dollars to ensure that all the minors on the planet have their basic needs covered, more or less the budgets of the 20 or 25 European football teams. with a bigger budget.
The economic issues associated with the spread of the virus dramatically draw visitors' attention. Specifically, there has also been no global response in this field to the hundreds of millions of unemployment it will produce, nor to the loss of the thousands of companies that provide basic supplies for the population. They are also surprised by the unpredictability in the face of the gigantic debt crisis that will inevitably occur once the current crisis is over. Although nothing stuns them as much as the fact that on Earth almost 125 times more resources are dedicated to placing bets in a kind of financial casinos, for these completely unknown visitors and whose logic they barely understand, than for activities directly aimed at satisfying your actual needs. Casinos whose maintenance is given more attention on Earth than the care and life of living beings.
Finally, visitors cannot understand that the planet that from the depths of space shows itself with formidable beauty is, in reality, an unnecessary hell for such a large part of its inhabitants. And they cannot explain how, despite the existence of so many gods and churches that proclaim goodness and love in all its corners, there are so many armed conflicts, such a widespread environment of hatred and revenge and such a poor sense of solidarity and of mutual cooperation.
More than anything, in the report that they will make of their discoveries on planet Earth, they will highlight the lack of awareness of its inhabitants about their own existence and about the fact that they make up a civilization that is in real and near danger of extinction as a consequence of your decisions decisions.
Back, one of the aliens pointed to one of the pages of Tousled Thoughts, a little book by Stanislaw J. Lec that he had scanned as a souvenir in the library of some towns they had visited, on his organic tablet.
- Here is what happens to these humans, he said: it is a planet that «has a clear conscience; he has never used it ».
Juan Torres López is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Seville. Dedicated to the analysis and dissemination of economic reality, in recent years he has published around a thousand opinion articles and numerous books that have become editorial successes. The last two, ‘Economy so as not to be fooled by economists’ and ‘Basic Income. What is it, how many types are there, how is it financed and what effects does it have? ’
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