AA Edit | A challenge for 8 billion

If Planet Earth were an escalator, then maybe as a race we have missed reading the safety notice carefully, for surely, God, or the Big Bang, did not design this magnificent blue cosmic ball hanging in space, elliptically orbiting around the sun, the only one capable of supporting life to be overloaded. And surely, the capacity of the earth cannot be much more than eight billion human beings.

Evolving into the masters of the planet, we have eaten up the forests, gobbled up resources underground, polluted the waters and the air, imbalanced the climate, depleted the ozone above and —  after making life miserable for every other life form — become a danger onto our own race.

Eight billion is a big number. Simply put, we are a lot of us on this earth. Beyond capacity, overloaded, the planet is screaming for help. From us. No, it is not screaming for help from us, but it is screaming for help, because of us. We are the danger. We are a nuisance.

We are also, to the best of our knowledge, the most profound of life forms, and perhaps the only one of our acumen in the universe. We have powers unparalleled in the entire universe.

It is time we used our powers — the best given to us — of reason, of logic — to deduce that we have to, at some point of time in our life as a race on earth, cap our growth. We don’t need more of us, but to do better for each other, and for the planet.

We must stop increasing our tribe. We have to urgently ensure we become more sustainable, and more friendly to earth and its other life forms, and ensure we don’t quickly bring into life that final human who would sink the planet.