When you don’t have much contact with people, you are more likely to be lost in contemplation.

Think about the world, the earth, and the universe.

The world’s cots are people and countries. The world has been radically changed by the new coronavirus; the world that seemed small in the 20th century with the development of cars and airplanes has become distant again with restrictions on travel. As usual, the U.S. blames China for the corona and threatens to reduce its contribution to the WHO, while in the Philippines the president has said he will shoot anyone who leaves the country.

Even in the online world, which was thought to be the closest to us, accusations against the government and attacks against those who think differently seem to be intensifying. It is a curious fact that the more we distance ourselves physically, the closer we feel to each other on the Internet.

When I think about the earth, I am actually relieved. Reduced airplane traffic and reduced demand for electricity due to stagnant industrial activity have led to a sharp drop in greenhouse gas emissions. China alone, the world’s largest emitter of CO2, has seen a 25 percent reduction (200 million tons worth).

The COP21 “Paris Agreement” (2015) sets the following common global long-term goals “to keep the global average temperature increase below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to limit it to 1.5°C.”
↓ The goals for each country by 2030 are as follows.
https://www.jepic.or.jp/data/g07.html

We are a little closer to the ideals of environmental activist Greta Thunberg than we thought, but we cannot be too sure. How do we think about the post-corona era? Instead of trying to return to the pre-Corona era, the new era should create an earth-friendly order.

Let’s all try to sort out the challenges to humanity given by the Corona.
Why don’t governments and industries take this opportunity to stop wasteful natural development and focus their efforts on fostering new industries based on clean energy?

By sending the message that it is the post-Corona era that is more profitable, we may be able to build a new era led by the Internet generation. The post-Corona era will be the last chance to completely break away from the 20th century business model.

Now, in the midst of a pandemic, our perspective is 180 degrees opposite from the cosmic perspective. What celebrities have been infected? What celebrity is infected? What young person goes out and is reprehensible, etc. It seems that we are looking for any and all mounting material to secure our precarious position. From a cosmic perspective, however, this is simply a question of the state of the ecosystem of organisms on a certain planet. The perception of Homo sapiens as the pinnacle of the natural world has crumbled fragilely. What defeated this supposedly strongest human being was not an extraterrestrial organism or anything else, but merely a virus of only 1 micrometer (micrometer μm = 1/1000 mm).

Let us see the pandemic as an opportunity to “come together” rather than accelerate the division of the world and its people. However, the concept of “becoming one” (United) is not the same as that of an earthquake or war. If only a few people or regions are damaged, the previous concept was fine. But this pandemic taught us that the business model that humans have built over the past 7 million years did not work. From the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, this is normal. From the history of the universe, 13.8 billion years, it is just a blink of an eye.

That said, humanity need not despise its own fate. I believe that with this cosmic perspective, we can boldly rethink our pre-coronal ways and take up the challenge again for the post-coronal era.

Atsushi Fukuda