I’d rather come back as a cockroach

Itrsquos called the crematorium moment Someone well loved has died and yoursquove 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 mdash ldquoDeath is certain Itrsquos the only thing thatrsquos certain One day you and I will be no morerdquoItrsquos a terrible moment No one likes to be reminded about their mortalityYet 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 diseaseIrsquom sure the thought has crossed your mind mdash 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 thatOh and what would you like to reincarnated as You canrsquot come back as a coronavirus Irsquom 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 yoursquore told and fighting for no reason with anyone who disagrees with youIrsquove been giving much thought to all these matters and my unanimous choice is the cockroach I think Irsquod be very happy as a cockroach You would tooHerersquos some simple proof that cockroaches never die try stomping on one Hard Irsquove 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 throughDr 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 cockroachrsquos 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 mmNo it didnrsquot die It boogied away as soon as it was releasedThe cockroach got going millions of years before dinosaurs When they got wiped out the roach didnrsquot It was morphing creating its own variants to see which design worked best There are about 4600 kinds of cockroaches around today and barely 30 of them are pests to humans Yoursquove probably seen one or two of these species in your kitchen when you came for a midnight snack and switched on the lights Everywhere cockroachesDr 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 6037 of its height mdash and without slowing down even a littleIts top speed is 50 times its own length about five feet per second making it the worldrsquos fastest insect In human terms yoursquod need to run at 200 miles an hour to outrun the cockroachJayaram has buried a cockroach under 900 times its weight mdash imagine a 4082 kg truck on a boy of 45 kg And no the roach skittered away aliveIt runs just as fast with one leg gone Even with three legs broken it ran at 7037 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 mdash at the same speedThere is little doubt that the cockroach is one of bestdesigned insects ever created guaranteed to survive plagues pandemics nuclear holocausts nerve gas mdash and your stomping feet There is equally little doubt that we humans are pathetically designed to survive unexpected catastrophesThe cockroachrsquos brilliant exoskeleton is the inspiration for Harvardrsquos Ambulatory Microrobot HAMR a nearly indestructible roachsized robot that can search in bombed out debris for survivorsOh and good news about our species Itrsquos 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 diseaseUnless of course a new killer variant emergesGreedy viruses like Ebola that kill nearly everyone they infect donrsquot spread very far because they kill their victims before they can spread the virusHere 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 cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper