The Day the Earth Stood Apart
The coronavirus is signaling humanity to slow down and contemplate.
The satellite images from NASA had shown that the pollution in China has gone down since the coronavirus outbreak.
There were also photos from people of Venice reporting that the cloudy Venice canals have turned crystal clear after coronavirus the tourism halt.
Apparently, the outbreak is affecting millions of lives and businesses, taking many lives with it, but most of the damages have been economical.
On the upside, more people are awakening. They cherish more physical, genuine connections (albeit through video calls) rather than those in online social media in the face of social distancing. They are learning new skills such as baking, sewing, and 3D-printing in the face of scarcity, making them more active producers than they had ever been. It is hopeful to see that our society might be heading toward a more well-balanced, sustainable one that is relying less on industrialization and mass-consumption that has been contributing to the global warming crisis for almost three centuries. We are looking at technologies in a new light and are moving past the app economy to a more integrated symbiosis.
Seriously, think about how we were going to go forward with all the mess we were in before the lockdown. The tech scandals after another (Theranos, Uber, WeWork), the Facebook scandal that had indirectly influenced the US primary election, the alarming speed at how our world is warming up, and much more. The re-enacted sentimental of space-traveling and humans as interstellar species, if anything, is the answer to this question — we were hopeless of the future that the only way to see forward is up.
This pandemic reminds me of the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still (both the superb original and the more boring 2008 remake), in which an alien race visited the human race and basically wiped out all technological advancement in the end, basically rewinding human race to the stone age, hence the name. Of course, that is fictional and over the edge, but we could consider viruses as “alien” that has been co-existing with living organisms and step in to curb a population from over-running the habitat. COVID-19 crisis may not entirely…
