Change A Moment In Time

Between as early as late 2004, and as late as early 2005, the world once again awakened to another natural catastrophe, a calamity that un equals both Chernobyl and Hiroshima disasters combined. This is about the infamous and dreadful Tsunami. Common knowledge fashioned into theories explains this insensitive frenzy phenomenon of the sea as a product of tremors or eruption of some sort, of the oceanic bed. People die, others are born, yet others continue to add years to life, but often forget to add life to years.

The hurricanes Ike and Gustav equally have fought to claim their own number of human lives too. But man, in his endeavor to calm his nerves, he has often resorted to throat irrigation with a wine here, but sooner or later, a war there.
Most of these natural disasters could however be determined earlier enough by the human kingdom, a kingdom that is splinter to the former and original, animal kingdom. We have often heard of a culture by the Nomads, a culture of paging their survival in the supposed earth’s most harsh ecosystems. This is about their ability to read signals, signals registered by the fauna around them. For instance, it is often alleged that by flying out of the bowels of the earth, white ants should have sensed well before time of an imminent downpour-lest they get soaked down to their nests. How about the drooping of the donkey’s ears to indicate the same phenomenon? That if a donkey’s ears stood erect, there tends to be dry spell for the next one day or so!

How about that bird from Alaska? This bird instinctively takes its wing and flies all the way across the major world’s time zones, visa or no visa, and this happens before every winter season for a “holiday” of few weeks in East Africa! Could this bird be telling mankind some lesson that we ignorantly defy heed? We often hear of the camel’s anti-duretic ability to save on water! Perhaps this can be credited to its anatomy. But how about reading from its unique sense smell, a sense to smell the direction of whirl wind. We are told that this ship of the desert strategically takes an advance cover on the lee ward of a boulder to fend off a possible “submerge”!

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrow viewpoints; don’t we have bigger houses but smaller families? Look. We have more degrees, but less sense; we have more knowledge, but less judgment. Talk about having more experts, but more problems? The modern man is trying every way possible to clean up the air, but choose to remain the proud owner of polluted soul.

It is this air purification assignment that reminds one of the plants’ main responsibilities, besides being the primary producers in the omnipotent food web. That every other new day of sunshine, the green plants dutifully pick carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rearranges this molecule into constituents carbon, which is hitherto channeled for carbohydrates synthesis, while oxygen is released back into the atmosphere. Whilst man is trying various new ways to commercialize the food stuff, food stuff manufactured in this equation, oxygen is widely still free for us to smell.

Man’s troubles however seems not to end. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but don’t we still have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor? From the jungle’s “Guinea book”, the cheetah still holds the world’s record as the fastest terrestrial animal. This record also indicates no blemish from doping by this unmatched sprinter of all time. A quick revert to the human kingdom: our counterpart book may have recorded 9-minute record or thereabout as best sprinter. But sooner or later, a petition against such sprinter for a post mortem trace of a banned substance by IAA is no news. May be what we should look forward to is for an expert, an expert who shall be required to fashion out a turbine efficient enough. And that this turbine should be mounted onto the tracks to tap the otherwise wasted energy by our “runners” in the name of athletics. And that this new energy source shall be christened "homo-thermal" power. This newly siphoned “homo-thermal” power energy shall then supplement the world’s otherwise suffocating energy resources. Then man shall indeed prove to have more conveniences against less time. But looking at lessons by small animals is the greatest of them all. Otherwise why should insects have a 13-chambered heart, while that of man is restricted to only 4? Talk about change of a moment in time.