I’d rather come back as a cockroach

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to rebirth, because pandemics terrify me. And, I’ve decided that if I want to live forever, I should be a cockroach

It’s called the crematorium moment. Someone well loved has died and you’ve just returned from the crematorium, sad and silent. Back home, with friends and relatives sharing remembrances and sweet memories of the departed soul, sooner or later someone says the grim words — “Death is certain. It’s the only thing that’s certain. One day you and I will be no more.”

It’s a terrible moment. No one likes to be reminded about their mortality. 

Yet, the last two years and even more, the last two months, have been brutal reminders of death lurking in puffs of wind, invisible, unpredictable, whimsical and lethal. Some get vaccinated to dodge the virus, others are convinced, with no evidence, that the vaccine will kill them faster than the disease.

I’m sure the thought has crossed your mind — is this how the human race ends, isolated and terrified on an ICU bed, gasping for air and flailing at phantoms? Will humankind survive this pandemic? And, if we did, what about the next pandemic? And the one after that?

Oh, and what would you like to reincarnated as? You can’t come back as a coronavirus, I’m sorry, because viruses are not considered to be alive. What about a pangolin? Or a virologist? Would anyone even want to be a human again, obsessed with WhatsApp, unquestioningly believing whatever you’re told and fighting for no reason with anyone who disagrees with you?

I’ve been giving much thought to all these matters and my unanimous choice is the cockroach. I think I’d be very happy as a cockroach. You would, too.

Here’s some simple proof that cockroaches never die: try stomping on one. Hard. I’ve done it, with my height and weight, and watched the cockroach pick itself up and limp off, to disappear into a crack in the wall that a blade would not have gone through.

Dr Kaushik Jayaram knows about this. He has been torturing cockroaches at the University of California at Berkeley for most of his adult life, trying to see how much punishment they can take. A lot. The cockroach’s superpower is its squishability. He compressed the common American cockroach, 12 mm high  when standing tall, inside a squishing machine, compressing it under a disk till it was flattened down to 3 mm. 

No, it didn’t die. It boogied away as soon as it was released.

The cockroach got going millions of years before dinosaurs. When they got wiped out, the roach didn’t. It was morphing, creating its own variants to see which design worked best. There are about 4,600 kinds of cockroaches around today and barely 30 of them are pests to humans. You’ve probably seen one or two of these species in your kitchen when you came for a midnight snack and switched on the lights. Everywhere, cockroaches.

Dr J decided to see how small a crack they could squeeze through by running them through a maze with narrowing exits. The blasted insect squeezed through a crack no higher than two coins flat, flattening itself to 60% of its height — and without slowing down even a little. 

Its top speed is 50 times its own length, about five feet per second, making it the world’s fastest insect. In human terms, you’d need to run at 200 miles an hour to outrun the cockroach.

Jayaram has buried a cockroach under 900 times its weight — imagine a 4,082 kg truck on a boy of 45 kg. And no, the roach skittered away alive.

It runs just as fast with one leg gone. Even with three legs broken, it ran at 70% of its normal speed. Jayaram made them smash into a wall at high speed. They flatted and distorted like something amoebic in a Disney cartoon and then, without breaking stride, switched from horizontal to vertical running — at the same speed.

There is little doubt that the cockroach is one of best-designed insects ever created, guaranteed to survive plagues, pandemics, nuclear holocausts, nerve gas — and your stomping feet. There is equally little doubt that we humans are pathetically designed to survive unexpected catastrophes. 

The cockroach’s brilliant exoskeleton is the inspiration for Harvard’s Ambulatory Micro-robot (HAMR), a nearly indestructible roach-sized robot that can search in bombed out debris for survivors.

Oh, and good news about our species. It’s impossible for any one virus to wipe out the human race. Because? While a small percentage will always die, a larger percentage will always survive and develop immunity. The pandemic will grow in waves, seeming to gain strength, but finally it will surrender and become endemic, coming annually like the flu. Just another disease.

Unless of course a new killer variant emerges.

Greedy viruses like Ebola that kill nearly everyone they infect don’t spread very far because they kill their victims before they can spread the virus.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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