We’re like the Titanic’s saloon band: the ship sinks and we just keep playing. I wonder why? Because we don’t know the truth, or because we can’t do anything else?
The water is bubbling at our ankles, but we’re just playing. The water hugs our waist, we keep playing. The water reaches our necks, the drummer, the pianist is already drowned, and we are still playing. Then we are overwhelmed by the water, the music falls silent, the ship sinks, the silence is dark and deep.
The planet is dying and we will continue to play until we are destroyed. We don’t care that the iceberg already cracked five watertight compartments, which is tantamount to shipwreck, as it is well known that the Titanic is unsinkable.
We believe the planet is indestructible, which may even be true. But man is not. We are destroying our environment with the sure awareness that we are inviolable, indestructible, while the iceberg has already cracked the fourth compartment.
But we are like that until we try everything, we don’t believe in anyone and anything. Until we are convinced that we can truly disappear from this planet, we will continue. Like the band on the Titanic.
Then the fifth compartment breaks, the coral reefs are destroyed, the Gulf Stream stops, Northern Europe is shrouded in ice, elsewhere the heat and fires digest everything, the frozen carbon dioxide melts, the heat continues to rise, the water level rises, life becomes impossible on land. And we keep playing, trying to escape underground, under water, in order to prolong our death by a few months, maybe years. We keep playing, pretending that we are invulnerable.
Then, as on the Titanic, the music is finally silenced, the last breath of the last man will be the last act of humanity on this planet. And the intellect may disappear from the Universe just because we played until the last minute.
Maybe, maybe, a few billion years, and there will be another intelligent race that, if it doesn’t know the fate of its predecessor, will follow the same path, only it will have less time left until the death of the Sun.
We are still alive now. Maybe if we stop playing music, and everyone is working to save the fifth compartment, to try to put life-saving devices, boats, rafts, life-saving boards on the water, made from any movable object, if we take trouble seriously, the Titanic arrives at the port. If it is not, and the record that truly matters than by sailing further south to avoid the icebergs that we know are there, even if the journey takes longer, but we reach our destination alive, if this is what matters, we escape. If we are arrogant and believe in the myth of our inviolability, it is over. No more attempts.
The Titanic was sunk by its own myth, which could not withstand the power of the iceberg breaking through the five compartments. Myths are in our heads, icebergs out there at sea. No reasoning helps against reality, no matter how we play God, Nature can soon make us ridiculous. The costume of God does not protect you in fire or in the rising water.
Nor do I think this writing will change anything, I don’t play that I see and know everything. I just read the signs and see the iceberg in the fog too, and maybe if I don’t try to avoid it but go with a nose for it, the Titanic won’t sink. If we do not try to avoid the inevitable, but accept the reality of danger, we understand and act according to it, if we do not want to defeat Nature but to live with it, then perhaps we will reach the port. If not then…
Three planets around the Sun, Venus and Mars, never carried life, or if they did, they lost it over time. The third is Earth, a planet that once carried life, now she is also silent and dead, dead with his other two companions, her sister and her brother.
Because we believed in myths more than in reality.
