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Ashish Paikray

Ashish Paikray

To infinity and beyond

Where do we stand? (Part-1)

6 min readJul 21, 2021

It is a complete and a total abuse of hello everyone but believe me if I sound serious to you it is not because I wanted to get your attention it is because I'm just left here with a lot of unanswered questions like what are we doing about climate change (and I'm very sure it’ll interest you because there's high chances that I might sound and display myself as a lunatic when I share a few things)and the very thing’s that’s causing them. The worst part is we see it happening in front of our eyes but it’s like our hands are tied because we can't do anything about it even if we want to.

I don't think it’s our ignorance but it's the lies that is costing us this planet. Lies that are meant to outshine the truth and scorch our future by feeding us with either surplus hopes or with inefficient disappointment's which never meant to happen because it is just a flaccid.

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Image credits: — SCOOPWHOOP
Image credit: -SCOOPWHOOP

Let's pick up thing’s one by one and nothing can be better except the thing that we're all surrounded from the top to the bottom and from sides to sides, everything we see has more than 95% chances that it has been derived and evolved directly or indirectly from crude oil.

Plastics, food wraps, rubber, possibly every moving object that has been made by human beings and this list will just go on for days if I don't stop. The concerning thing here is not “ how many things can be connected back with it” but “how much are we involved with it”. Plastics is all that I will be talking here because it is the most widely used thing and I don't think there’ll be anyone in this planet who hasn't used them various purposes (except from the untouched tribes).

To be honest it doesn't goes anywhere because neither it's decomposable(I've seen in the backside of classmate notebooks breakdown of these begins at about 450 years and no idea about how much time it takes for complete breakdown). It's cheap, widely available even after ban by government in many cities(I can't understand why nobody does anything about it), it comes with everything from food to furniture and I hope your minds are right now being rustled with usage of plastics. Since it’s invention it has became important and unavoidable in almost all the cases sometimes more than important because it’s the utter necessity like healthcare and this dependency graph on plastics will under no circumstances fall and if it falls it’ll wipe humanity with it.

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These images belong to a power plant in close vicinity to my city and i apologies because i couldn’t capture all of the garbage that’s lying there untreated and just waiting for it’s turn to be burned. There’s almost a fire every time even rain can’t stop this fire. There’s a big riff made of this waste which may be of about 50–60 meter’s high which even dwarfs the image of the power plant.

We have three ways where we can go from here: -

  1. Find an alternative for plastics which has to be either biodegradable or recyclable to the extent so that no matter what shape or size it is in we can still extract something out of it (it needs to be cheap because not everyone can afford one square a meal a day).
  2. Innovate the existing, I've heard some forms of plastics are recyclable and the forms that aren’t recyclable ends up in landfills or dumped at some place which is far from the city so that people who generate it don't get to see or deal with the aftermath. Every thing has a limit and i really hope we can figure out something before we reach to the limit. Everything has a end but somethings are big enough that their ends can't be perceived just like a sine wave.
  3. Clear everything what we’ve created till this point just the same as the same as “No shit no mess”.

Let's shift our momentum to something not very different which can be considered something without which terms like industrialization has absolutely no meaning. Folks I'm talking about fuel.

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Discovery of crude oil can be termed as those things that has shaped this world that humankind intended to built and up to a very strong percentage it has been successful and has shown a unmatched progress which doesn't seem to stop at any moment in the present nor in the future. but what about the transition? well this is what nobody seems interested for because transition which complete change of work which mainly is for the fuel that this industry engulfs. Recently we’ve seen a lot rise in interest in electric vehicles, the stock of these electric vehicle companies are sky rocketing and so as their sales because as famously said use of electricity doesn’t emits any greenhouse gases but what about it’s production?

But here's the crack in the castle of glass, electric vehicle’s are super eco-friendly and I've got absolutely no problem with that but it runs on electricity and from where and how’re we going to fulfill this surge in the electricity demands? We still have thermal power plants in this country which runs on coal and goes by 281 in number and in the whole world it is 2200 (not considering under construction Plants) and with an average emission of 0.91–0.95 kg/kWh and this number if calculated with a consideration of all the thermal power plants that runs on coal then this data will go beyond our imagination. More electricity needs to more demands and the rest I think is very clear and doesn’t needs an address to it.

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That's India’s largest coal driven thermal power plant with an installed capacity of 4,760 MW.

Conventional sources of fuel which covers all the non renewable sources of fuel if we talk in terms of percentage then the shear domination to the energy market or our lives is more than 80% where as for renewable it is not even 20% . We talk about going for renewable sources of energy and if we make the transition now we’ll gonna lose our best shot in battling out climate change. The whole renewable system will crash due to the overload and will leave us with no other option than going with non conventional sources of energy and this time demand will be exponential if we ever trace it in graph which i feel won't be needed because everything will just happen in front of us in a pace that’s unimaginable and it’s non reversible.

Talking about problems I can go all day long but that’s not what matter’s. At the end of the day what can I bring to the table is what matters, in this case we need a solution to end it because i won’t be wrong we’re in a paradox it’s getting tough to get out but it’s getting dense with each and every move we make. Honestly we trust and depend so much on conventional sources and because of this it has grown to a magnitude where it can’t be replaced. If replaced we’ll be needing something very similar which matches it’s magnitude but at the current moment it seems like humanity is not but has ran out of options and believe me it’ll be a deadlock when this fossil fuel ends.

In order to defend and stay out longer in this loosing game we need a catalyst that will give time for things like renewable sources to evolve and square off that percentage with non renewable sources of energy only then transition would be possible until then any attempts of transitions will just have a severe consequence which won't be visible but when it turns out to be visible there wouldn’t be anything that can be done except watching everything that we built fall to the ground and turn out to be the very dust from which it was built from.

The catalyst that I've been talking about is Nuclear energy with both both forms fission and fusion but i believe if we can harness fusion which is otherwise making can also be termed as “creation of a star in this planet”, it is a game changer for not only survival of human beings but a source of clean fuel with n number of years in existence and supply. Also we shouldn’t forget about the possibilities it will open up for us and one of them which is most recognizable is deep space exploration in this way we can put an end to the fuel problem not forever but till the time it’ll be needed to be upgraded again.

Leaving you with a quote that framed my whole childhood

“Its not my planet or yours but its ours”.

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