A quest for knowledge

Dr. Raj Shree Dhar
To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the Universe, seeing deaths before my eyes?  After nuclear and chemical wars, the protective ozone layer will be destroyed and filled with radioactive elements and solar ultraviolet radiations which would last for several years.  It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. Even in sleep, the brain is pulsing, throbbing and flashing with thoughts.
We look back through millions of years and see the great will to live -struggling from shape to shape, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land. For a million years it was clear to everyone that there was no other place than the earth; then we noticed that we were not the centre and purpose of Universe, but rather lived on a tiny and fragile world lost in a great cosmic ocean with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars.
Every thinking person fears small or big wars, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse. A school girl who survived in Second World War wrote: “Through darkness like the bottom of hell, I could hear the voices of the other students calling for their mothers. And at the base of the bridge, was a mother weeping, holding above her head a baby that was burnt bright red all over the body, the students stood with only their heads above the water without hands, calling for their parents. But every single person who passed was wounded and there was no one to turn to for help. And the hair on the heads was covered with dust and they did not appear to be human or a creature of this world”.
There is no other species on Earth other than human that knows Science and Mathematics. Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer but in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet Earth from which we spring. Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. The author of this nature has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with other great bodies of the Universe like when we think of Aliens from other planets. H.G.Wells has written in The War of the Worlds: “No one would have believed that this world was being watched closely by the intelligences greater than man’s”. May be the Cosmos is densely populated with intelligent beings and maybe there will be no humans elsewhere, but only on this planet. This way we are endangered species, in fact every one of us is precious, in at least one hundred billion galaxies, we cannot find another. So let us live with harmony and save each of us and our planet from disaster.
There must be many such worlds scattered through space but our search for them begins with the wisdom and the search for its knowledge is prized. How can we explain the global arms race or justify the destabilizing developments? There are so many predictions about a third world war and laser ray attacks which can lead to a complete submersion of the southern part of Asia by some natural disaster and so on. Each of us can make a personal contribution to save the future of the world from such predictions. We can invest our energies in an enterprise devoted not to death but life, the expansion of our understanding of the Earth and its inhabitants and the search for life elsewhere. Interests vested in preparations for small and big wars can be reinvested in the exploration of the Cosmos.
Every aspect of nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those who are afraid of the Universe and who prefer the comforts of superstitions cannot confront the world but those who have a quest for knowledge will certainly explore the structure of Cosmos and will penetrate into its deep mysteries. For unknown ages, there were no planets, no life and there was darkness everywhere. A first generation of stars was born, and soon planets received the light from stars. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. The Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gas forming oceans and atmosphere. Sun gradually bathed and warmed the Earth. Single celled plants evolved, and life began to generate its own food by photosynthesis. The story of Earth may be unique in all the Milky Way Galaxy. We know from the fossil record that the origin of life happened around 4 billion years ago. Human beings grew up in forests; we exhale carbon-dioxide which the plants then recycle to make more carbohydrates which is a surprising arrangement – for each inhaling is others exhaling.
Mathematics and Science can improve our lives as there is a quest to seek knowledge in our Cosmos. Like Sun and Moon, stars always rise in the East and set in the west, taking whole night to cross the sky. There is an order, predictability, permanence about the stars. In agriculture, we have to take care of plants and harvest crops in the right season. Kepler and Newton, the famous mathematicians, represent the discovery that mathematical laws pervade all of Nature, Earth as well as sky. Apart from this, their meticulousness in arranging a perfectly accurate data on the motion of planets is commendable.
The Earth is a lovely place to live among all the other planets. Venus is too hot and Mars is too cold. We can lead a heavenly life and never encounter a natural disaster more violent than a storm. World is being devastated by humans as we are polluting the poor planet. Our intelligence and technology have given us the power to bring destruction to the planet affecting the entire human family.
A few million years ago there were no humans. Who will be here after few million years? If we survive, our time will be famous for only one reason that at this dangerous moment of technological adolescence we managed to avoid self-destruction.
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