Last year was not a normal year, to put it mildly. With 2020 being unprecedented for the COVID-19 pandemic, what can we expect for 2021 or the following years or decades? What will happen to us if we continue to wear masks, practice social distancing, and avoid travel for generations? Considering the countless examples in nature, of adaptation of species to changing circumstances, these cultural changes could eventually affect our species if allowed to continue indefinitely.
Many people used hand sanitizer before the pandemic, but probably fewer people wore masks to avoid spreading germs. Nowadays, wearing a mask in public is expected except in certain circumstances. Considering a furnace filter can reduce the flow of air in a house, I would think a mask would interfere at least a little with a person’s ability to breathe freely. As a result, we might be getting less oxygen while wearing masks. Looking back over a hundred million years ago, it seems like many animals were much bigger. Some people credit the larger animal size to having more oxygen in the atmosphere. If a decrease in available oxygen can mean a reduction in the physical size of animals, the same thing might happen to us. So humans might end up getting smaller, thanks to using masks to help protect us from the pandemic. This is ironic, since I read somewhere that we are generally taller than people were in the Middle Ages.
Being so unprecedented, the pandemic has also clearly caught our attention in media. Individuals now need current information on how safe a given location is and what the current national and local rules are. So the pandemic has many of us checking the news more often than before, maybe even getting us used to checking the news on other topics while we’re at it. This might lead to new habits of looking to centralized sources of information. Similarly, social distancing has led to many organizations and individuals switching further to technology, to avoid now-undesirable close contact between individuals. The accumulated additional focus on getting direction from a centralized place may lead to a hive mentality over time. Granted that’s how government works to some extent, democracy is intended to allow us a significant amount of freedom. The pandemic of course has already led to some freedoms being temporarily removed, such as with stay-at-home orders. So, democracy may already be less of an influence, with an increase in taking direction from others.
One example of government providing direction is the recommendation to avoid unnecessary travel. This, along with avoidance of people who travel, can have its own set of consequences. As people travel less and stay close to home, we tend to encounter the same people more often. The same people might tend to repeatedly fill the same roles in society. This is similar to free-roaming cells evolving to be in relatively fixed positions and perform specific functions in a cell colony, organ, or organism. Science is aware of this kind of unifying arrangement happening with certain organisms and calls it a superorganism. Essentially it’s a group of the same kind of organism behaving like a single organism. Ant and bee colonies are two examples of superorganism. The new avoidance of things related to travel could also lead to additional local sourcing of goods and services. Families, cities, and states may become more self-reliant, increasing the tendency towards superorganisms. What will become of the United States? Will we become more of a loose association of states like the European Union?
One additional consequence of avoidance of remote physical contact is a little more on the grim side. During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been hope that we may develop a natural “herd immunity” to the disease. This is supposedly how we tolerate other common diseases so well, like the flu and the common cold. However, with less remote contact, there will probably be less exposure. Possibly there will be localized groups of humans where the decreased exposure leads to decreased immunity. Some diseases that we currently tolerate well, may become more medically serious for such groups.
Most of us are by now well aware of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our daily lives and society in the past year. This is just a short list of guesses about the possibilities of the years to come. We can guess about the future, but it’s hard to even predict what will happen in the next year or two. On the bright side, we humans seem to be adaptive enough to survive almost anything. Life for us might be different in the distant future, but it’s a good bet that we will still be here. With necessity being the “mother of invention,” it will also be interesting to see what science and technology will offer us in that distant future.
(c) Copyright 2021 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 