Innovation and Progress, at what Cost?

Since the 1870s after Max Plank deduced his energy constant, the world of physics opened up like a blooming flower. Planck's constant, is the quantum of electromagnetic action that relates a photon's energy to its frequency. The Planck's constant multiplied by a photon's frequency is equal to a photon's energy. Humanity accomplished greatly in the field of Physics when the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012 at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. But with all this technological development, is the intrinsic quality of life improving or just are we just striving for a lifestyle of extravagant luxury?

Since Copernicus and the Galileo, history has detailed the achievements of so many scientific minds, striving and unveiling a variety of modulations to discover the manipulative possibilities of energy. Doing so, humanity has gone from Graham Bell to Nikola Tesla, overcoming all hurdles to communicate at ease. Today, we can Video Conference with a number of people over a mobile phone just as Nikola Tesla had once suggested. However, the downturn is that microwaves generated for 4G and 5G networks can be detrimental to the health of all living species. In this case, how will we address the betterment of Healthcare of our growing society. Are we introspecting into the consequences of development or just carrying along with scientific innovation and infrastructural development oblivious to the possibility of accidently annihilating humanity as collateral damage ?

In comparison to the destruction and bloodshed executed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, Ottoman and Genghis Khan that plagued humanity for the control of colonial resources, what has this era done differently? As those old Empires developed castles, roads and efficient irrigation of crops. This era has developed Digital Technology and found better ways of discharging latrine waste efficiently so that a visit to the toilet becomes a fragrant experience. However, in our pursuit of faster means of digital communication and digital transactions, electronic waste, medical waste, chemical waste and garbage continue to plague humanity. As our development of Healthcare advances in leaps and bounds, we find ourselves in a precarious situation. Even with better Health-Care policies, humanity continues to endure the pangs of poor health due to new strands of viruses and bacteria.

So, what do we do with all our knowledge and all our technology? The prosperity of our growing population has found ever emerging road blocks due to poverty, pandemics, economic recessions, continuous war for the control of crude oil and corruption. There is plenty of motivation by innovative individuals for non conventional generation of eco friendly energy. Facebook forums and YouTube are loaded with "Do It Yourself" ideas to promote a wide variety of hacks in mechanical cum electrical ideas. However, the mass public is too distracted with advertisement from brands for their home cum industrial appliances and machinery respectively. For the sake of industrialization and generation of corporate funding, the government of many nations have looked away and / or allowed deforestation. However, there isn't any will to reclaim deserts and arid lands for development of the same industries. Within our great nation of India, State governments are in litigation with each other over river water with one State diverting the natural flow of certain rivers for irrigation of arid lands in their own State while creating a short-fall in the water table in the next State. Coastal States find no motivation to spend money on "Desalination and purification" of sea water, but instead continue to focus only on the litigation in the Supreme Court. Had some investment been made into Desalination of sea water by our State of Goa, a solution to at least part of the deficiency in the supply of potable water to the people of Goa would have been answered.

The most inspirational news in discoveries and innovations, is the successful deployment and launch of Falcon 9 by "SpaceX" and Billionaire entrepreneur 'Elon Musk'. A commendable effort at reducing the huge costs on launching rockets into Space. His innovation continues as he strives to build a network of 40,000 small low orbit satellites to provide 10GB Mbps Internet facility anywhere on earth. The project is known as "Starlink" and till date 12,000 satellites have already been deployed and commissioned providing services to the USA and UK. However, Elon Musk has larger plans for SpaceX. He is building a Starship to take humans to the planet Mars. At present prototypes are in testing and due to a small error in thrust power, SN10 failed in landing safely after launch. Failures are stepping stones for Elon Musk who is very optimistic about SN11. However, how does humanity see the long term prospects of landing on Mars? Well, landing on Mars and coming back as Apollo 11 did after landing on the moon is good. After all, such projects help humanity in developing technology that can be used to improve our earthly lifestyle like "Memory foam mattresses". But getting back to the idea of going to Mars to build a human settlement and civilization there, that may not be the best solution. It could create a whole new problem. Using the conquering human enthusiasm, huge amount of resources and wealth will be siphoned from earth to build infrastructure for habitation of humans on Mars. Obviously, only scientists, and the cream of human mental innovative and mathematical skill will be shipped to Mars to build life there. Manual labour at Mars will be executed by robots as Elon Musk has already suggested. But to pay for this ambitious project, funds from earthly tax payers will finance a basic salary for all those who work on Mars as well as the infrastructure that is needed to be maintained.

Rome was built by ambitious generals and its glory maintained from the resources of its colonies. The same goes to London, Lisbon, Paris etc.... Colonizing Mars is just the repeat of the mistakes of the past that may impoverish most of our global economy.