Atom-sized Androids* Taking Over!

Toxic fumes, unbearable heat, total blindness, entire cities crashing down onto the melting pavement, and gritty particles getting stuck inside creatures’ mutated noses, throats, and lungs… and yet, it is not what it seems to be. It is our future. It is things adapted to an environment in which the known world no longer exists, in which Earth’s surface scenery has succumbed to the artificial change and, against every forecast, human kind has survived.

Although some may argue that Global Warming effects are pure science-fiction imagery, some of them are already easily perceived (Gore). Stepping aside definition, causes and future probable facts, analyzing the social impact of Global Warming and establishing the most reasonable solutions are the most important subjects these days. Furthermore, this is not a scientific, data-deliverer report, but an awakening announcement that will snap its fingers loudly in whoever-is-reading ears: Global Warming is a serious problem that is deteriorating Earth in which humans are to take all the responsibility, so measures against it should be taken quickly (Gore).

Now, a prelude is mandatory. Global Warming is the rising of temperatures in a relatively short period of time (Strickland and Grabianowsky). It is the consequence of several factors, but it is caused mainly by human activity, that covers technology manufacturing and usage (The 11^th Hour); the accumulating greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, that trap more sun rays than necessary; and a non-stoppable vicious cycle of Earth damage, due to that all this depletion keeps adding and adding as time passes by. Global Warming has been proved to provoke stronger natural disasters, more and new diseases, soil degradation plus more starvation and poverty, disruption of the food chain, animal plagues, and animals’ extinction, among others.

Truly, economic development and technology have played a decisive role in the Global Warming issue. International enterprises, countries’ governments and the consumer societies are destroying the Earth. Several weeks ago, I had a very interesting conversation with my uncle, Guillermo, who studied engineering on agronomy at the Tec University. One thing he said was that if we saw everything from a thermodynamic (physics, related to energy) perspective we could notice that none production process is worth it. He also said that people’s living standards are so high that they’re impossible to satisfy in a sustainable way. Stephen Hawking said that “human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn’t any more available” (The 11^th Hour).  

On one hand, according to Johan Rockstrom, the exponential growth of population, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, natural resources’ non-sustainable exploitation, etc., all by-products of  the liberalist economy, have shown the same rate of change throughout the last six decades. Also, since the Industrial Revolution, the world has been converted into no more than a mean for people to meet their expectations, and the rich minority has contributed to it in the largest scale. On the other hand, Dr. Peter Tsigari, economist at the Thompson Rivers University, gives a hope to the economy by concluding that investing in clean energies would help the economy of the U.S. by diminishing the GDP percentage needed to cover the price of fossil fuels (Strickland and Grabianowsky).

There are a lot of things we can do in order to help the environment and slowly vanish our footprint in the atmosphere. I would like to divide those solutions into two groups: the easily available and the not-so-easily available, but still possible. The first type are actions that we can take right now, at this precise moment: turn off the lights, turn off things you aren’t using and disconnect them, recycle, drink out off of glass bottles, or stop using plastic bags. The second type covers things like getting a hybrid car, re-vegetate a nearby area or start using clean energy sources. So after all, you can stop Global Warming… will you?

*Android: according to the Oxford Dictionary definition, a robot (machine controlled by computer) which is made to look like a human.