I agree I’d like to look for Jadoo and have him give me superhuman abilities so that I can fly when I play basketball next time, but 1.7 million people want to look for Jadoo and play basketball?
Jokes apart, this Area 51 raid is going wild now. There are over 1.5 million people who have signed up on social media to raid the secret location in USA on September 20th.
People are curious, well and good. But have so many people ever signed up for a better cause like feeding the homeless or planting 5 saps each? Imagine 1.7 million people planting 5 saplings each. That is over 8.5 million trees all planted at once.
But aliens are more important, somehow. Let us discuss those many people not signing up to clean oceans, which are polluted so devastatingly with tonnes of plastic.
Current Ocean Pollution Statistics
The condition is so bad that about 8 million pieces of plastic land in our oceans, out of the 320 million tonnes humans produced annually.
8 out of 320 might seem less, but imagine 8 million tonnes. That is about the equivalent weight of 45,977 Boeing 747 airplanes.
More than 5000 plastic items are found per mile on beaches in UK, Australia and USA. Since 1950, the plastic production by humans has gone from 1.5 million tonnes to more than 300 million tonnes, and we’re throwing a lot of that in the oceans.
According to UN environment, if this trend persists, by 2050, our oceans will have more plastic than fishes. Already, about a million sea birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals have been prey to our deadly garbage.
A small bottle of plastic for you, might be a contribution to the loads and loads that go into the water bodies every year.
Also Read: Back In Time To The Indian Ocean Tsunami: Catastrophic Waves That Killed 280,000 People
What’s So Intriguing About Area 51?
People think the US Air Force and scientists are researching on UFO’s and alien technology in this big campus called Area 51, somewhere near Nevada. It is even believed that there are aliens helping people at Area 51 to get technically advanced.
The Facebook event “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” has about 1.7 million people “interested” in it. For Indians to understand, that’s more than twice the population of Bhutan, our tiny neighbour country.
Are We Not Sensible Humans Anymore?
Probably, what I believe from personal experience is that people are waiting for someone to initiate something. The Area 51 event was initiated. It went viral. If an ocean clean-up drive will be initiated, those many people will sign up if and only if the initiative is by a famous celebrity.
Also, there are a vast majority who say it isn’t their job. Well, for all those people who say their job isn’t to clean the oceans, please don’t expect much water for your further generations.
This is how we are forgetting who we are, and why we are called “humans”. If only these many people had signed up and actually implemented an ocean/sea clean-up, a sixth of them would be plastic free in a year itself.
There are times I wonder if my children, or their children will ever be able to see the actual beauty of mother nature. Disheartening as it is, people are ready to discover aliens out of sheer curiosity but not ready to join hands and make Earth clean and green again, even after they know that we’re slowly killing it.
Image Sources: Google Images
Sources: Cnet, UN Environment, Surfers Against Sewage
Connect With The Blogger: @som_beingme
Amazing Somnath. I totally agree with you. But after cleaning the oceans or other land areas, where to throw all the plastic. Becasu we can’t burn it. How we are going to dispose? A cry came from heart that how we, humans abused the planet where we live and unable to recorrect our mistake though we are repenting what we have done. Yes you are correct, instead of go after aliens madly people can do other useful things, for example using science to invent a thing which decompose plastic. May be this is impossible.