Mimicking Nature and the truth about Zombies!
In this video, Michael Pawlyn advocates the Cradle-to-Cradle vision and gives us examples of how we should mimic nature to create more intelligent designs. I added my own example of biomimicry below with a story about Zombies.
Most people know that eating the Japanese dish Fugu, prepared by an untrained chef, is like playing Russian roulette with your mouth. The dangerous neurotoxin inside a wild Blowfish causes respiratory arrest and paralysis with fatal result. Just 2 mg is enough to kill a person.
What most people don’t know is that this neurotoxin, called tetradoxin, is used in voodoo rites in Haiti. Witch Doctors administer a mix of tetradoxin and datura poison to the bloodstream causing suspended animation, or artificial hibernation. The patient enters a death-like state, and is `reborn` after the poison wears off.
In some cases, patients have been declared clinically dead. Occasionally, this results in the patient being buried alive, while their relatives are oblivious of the poisoning. After the poison works out, the state of hibernation ends. The Zombie-Patient rises from his grave and a myth is born.
This poisonous mixture causes your metabolism to go into slow-motion, until you enter a death-like state. The human body is effectively on stand-by and this could enable humans to go on extremely long space journeys in the future, like the discovery of new star systems.
Meanwhile, blowfish rates are declining rapidly. The Japanese are notorious for overfishing, and the Blowfish is no exception (it is one of the countries delicacies). We should not exhaust the ecosystems from which we barely know anything yet. If we mimic nature before we extinguish its diverse flora and fauna, we may truly go where no one has gone before. I always wanted to see Alpha Centauri.
PS: If you want to read more about this, check out:
- http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/SecretesofHaitisLivingDead.pdf
- http://www.livescience.com/211-hibernation-technique-work-humans.html
- The Serpent and the Rainbow
- Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
15/21 Guns
