Food, Daily Needs & Nuclear Power

What is the stupidest thing ever conceived and consistently executed by mankind ? Arguably, it is burning fossil fuels for getting energy. Oil, coal or natural gas release paltry amounts of energy as they burn with Oxygen in the atmosphere. These minerals are otherwise useful for making fertilizers, plastics and several valuable things. But as they get burned for energy, these mineral reserves get depleted at an enormous pace, and will vanish completely within 200 years ! The costs of energy rise exponentially, and so do the costs of everything (everything uses energy for production and for transport). As oil and coal reserves go downhill, so does the purchasing power of people. People will starve and governments will tumble.

The only people that get richer are those who control access to the tap. There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a real democracy !

But above all, fossil fuels are one of the dirtiest ways to derive our energy. Combustion of oil or coal releases thousands of waste products directly into our fragile atmosphere. Most of them are poisonous and a few of them are even radioactive. They are tremendously affecting the thin layer of atmosphere that sorrounds us - these effects range from global warming to acid rain. As a result, millions of people are dying and millions of plant and animal species are going extinct.

Why do we continue with this insanity ?

A green world run on nuclear energy

Let me present you an alternative scenario. We use solar energy to cater to about 30% of our energy needs, that is as much as it makes economical and ecological sense. For the rest of our energy needs, we construct nuclear power reactors which utilize Uranium and Thorium reserves. A new design called the breeder reactor, though slightly more costly to build, makes 100 times more efficient use of the nuclear fuel. Energy equivalent to a gallon of petrol will be produced as cheaply as 0.5 cents (6 paise for a litre of petrol in Indian terms). The electricity production will be entirely clean; the radioactive waste of the entire world for one year will fit into a small room. We convert this waste into glass, seal it in multiple layers and store it deeply in the rocks. We construct an elaborate railway network, and heavily discourage road transport. We replace gas-guzzling cars in the cities with noiseless electric vehicles. We run those indispensable road vehicles of the countryside using biofuels, and later shift to Hydrogen. In terms of safety and cleanliness, this economy will be million times more efficient.

In principle, this nuclear-fission based economy will be sustainable for several million years. But within a few hundred years, science will inevitably discover newer, more efficient ways of producing energy.

In this series of posts (tagged nuclear), my objective is to untangle a few strands from the cobweb of doubt and fear which sorround nuclear energy. Many people have legitimate concerns about nuclear, and I treat them with respect. My intention is to add some more information and perspective into this debate.

" What's at stake ? "

Opposition to nuclear energy is costing us the battle with coal and oil. This opposition is fuelled discretely by oil and coal company bosses, who might infiltrate green environmental groups with their spies ! Solar energy cannot fight coal and oil by itself, and it is not just good people who are aware of this. A shift away from oil based economy will hurt certain people, and they will do their best to prevent this shift from happening.

The US dollar is tied to the oil prices, and a falling dollar is accentuated by an immediate rise in oil prices. These oil prices drive the prices of food and daily needs everywhere around the world, as is happening right now. Whenever there is talk of investing in clean energy options, the oil prices are strategically reduced. The very next moment, they are rised again. A lot of FUD is spread over all kinds of alternative energies, including nuclear. Unconsciously, several environmental groups become party to this strategy. Breaking from the vicious oil economy through nuclear power is vital to ensuring the security of food and daily needs in poor countries.

If the primary concern with oil is inflation, that with coal is pollution. The statistics are alarming. China is building 10 times more coal plants than nuclear plants. A similar story repeats throughout the world. The filth dumped by coal into the atmosphere affects the world in entirety. This is why it is important to encourage clean energy production, particularly in developing countries such as India.

"Breeder reactors can never be built, so nuclear energy is a lost hope"

Answer : Without breeder reactors, the nuclear resources in earth will not last for more than 600 years. And without breeder reactors, there will be enormous amounts of nuclear waste awaiting disposal. But breeder reactors lie at the heart of nuclear hope. This is because these reactors use 60% of the Uranium fuel instead of the 0.3% used in the current light water reactors(LWR). With breeders, nuclear resources will last for several millions of years ! There have been several efforts in the world to construct breeder reactors, but most of these reactors have been abandoned now. Sly anti-nuclear activists look upon this fact as a proof that breeders can never be constructed.

The truth is more intriguing. Firstly, breeder reactors have been successfully demonstrated, and we have 300 reactor-years of experience in operating them worldwide. India has been operating an experimental breeder reactor since 1985 ! Indian nuclear scientists have demonstrated a revolutionary design in 2005 of 'A Thorium Breeder Reactor' that can produce 600 MW of electricity for two years 'with no refuelling and practically no control manoeuvres.' This has been dubbed as the world's safest nuclear reactor. With such highly efficient designs available, why do we not construct breeder reactors ?

As it currently stands, reprocessing spent Uranium in breeder reactors is more expensive than mining fresh Uranium from earth. As long as shallow reserves of Uranium are available (for the next 60 years), breeder reactors will be economically unfavorable.

An MIT interdisciplinary panel has discouraged breeder reactors for not making economical sense currently, but this anti-nuclear activist has quoted this to say that the breeder design itself has been termed infeasible. This type of reporting is extremely dishonest.

Even though breeder reactors are currently uneconomical, we do well to construct them because they are essential for securing our energy's future.

Breeder reactors have also drawn a lot of political ire due to the fact that they produce high grade plutonium, which can potentially be used for bombs. The India-US nuclear deal had been in hot water for a few months due to the perceived US objections against breeder reactors. These objections have later been resolved in the current version of the deal.

The most visible example of a discontinued breeder reactor is the Superphénix reactor in France. The reason it stopped working was because of a missile attack by a radical environment group !

Technically speaking, ther are absolutely no hindrances for constructing breeder reactors. However, there are several political hurdles that need be overcome.

"Reduce consumption and use solar energy. Don't go nuclear."

Answer : No doctor will prescribe the same medicine for obesity and malnutrition. There is a humongous disparity in the consumption levels of the world today. It is true that most of the consumption in Western societies is wasteful and directly harmful to the environment. But nuclear energy is a valuable aide in lifting up the living standards of the developing world. The energy-consumption levels of the third world will have to inevitably rise to obtain decent living standards.

Apart from producing greenhouse gases, we are rapidly depleting mineral and water reserves (Consumerist societies are meat eating. Production of meat consumes 12 times more water than the production of vegetable protein). Some of the clean energy options such as bio-fuels, wind power and hydel power compete with food production for these resources, so they have to be used with care. The depletion of these resources will cause famine and war all over the world. As I have mentioned earlier in my blog, bio-fuels could be a valuable tool in making land profitable in the developed world, thus ending the food subsidies that are enjoyed by big farmers there. Developing countries should look upon bio-fuels more carefully, because they are more pressed for land and water.

Both nuclear and solar energy are valuable towards desalinating water, and averting famine. Along with attempts at reducing consumption, these novel sources of energy will prove priceless in improving the well being of the world.

"Nuclear reactors are unsafe. Nuclear waste is very dangerous."

Answer : The Chernobyl disaster clouds the vision of most nuclear opponents. But what many fail to note is that this faulty Soviet design is no longer currently used in any reactor in the world. We have several thousands of reactor-years of experience in running safe nuclear reactors worldwide. The safety record for this industry has been outstanding. Unlike coal plants, nuclear plants release no harmful products into the atmosphere and all the bi-products are carefully accounted for. Most people are unaware of the fact that coal energy releases far more radioactive substances than nuclear energy, and that all this radioactive waste is dumped directly into the atmosphere. Coal mining remains one of the most hazardous occupations of the world, and claims hundreds of lives every year.

Nuclear waste is carefully monitored and stored in a confined environment. The risk of contamination of this radioactive waste with air or water is miniscule. The levels of radioactivity fall drastically with time, and after 600 years, this waste will be no more radioactive than naturally occuring Uranium in the earth's crust !

Politics is all about taking calculated risks. The risks of not using Nuclear (reverting to coal and oil, ruining the environment, letting millions of people starve) far outweigh the risks of running nuclear reactors or storing nuclear waste.

"Nuclear reactors are expensive to build. Nuclear Power is very expensive."

Answer : It is true that nuclear reactors are more expensive to build than coal plants. But, if environmental costs are taken into account, nuclear plants quickly rise to be much cheaper. In the USA, there have been several re-legislations for improving nuclear safety, which required the removal and reconstruction of nuclear reactors. These made the costs of construction to spiral out of control. Thus, nuclear power industry had a political death in the US. In other countries, several nuclear power reactors have been built to operate on profit. France currently obtains 80% of its electricity needs through nuclear power. The produced electricity is the cheapest in Europe. Now that we have designs of very safe reactors available to us, scale-economics come to play in the construction process. Nuclear plants of today are already cost-competitive with coal plants.

Clean energy is expensive in the first stage of construction - whether it be nuclear or solar power. But we cannot afford to build coal plants for the reason of meagre short term profits. The long-term costs far outweigh any such benifits.

"Let's encourage solar energy, because nuclear can be evil"

Answer : The energy in sun's rays is so dilute that we need to have a really large receptacle to capture a reasonable amount. We cannot cover up the surface of earth with solar panels to derive all the energy that we need. We would need land for agriculture, forests, housing and so on. Solar energy is renewable and clean. But alas, the current technology cannot provide us sufficient solar energy for completely replacing oil and coal. We can nourish warm hopes for a future based on solar energy, just as we can nourish warm hopes for a future based on nuclear fusion. But failure to act in the current moment has enormous costs due to continued dependency on oil and coal.

Being a tropical country, India should use solar energy for all the potential that it has to offer. It can be used for water purification, and for airconditioning during the summer time. Nice pocket applications such as these are easier to be conceived and deployed. We need real efforts in this direction.

Wind, tidal and hydel power are basically solar energy in disguise. Each of these energies have their costs and limitations. For example, hydel power projects inundate large swathes of forests and agricultural land. Each of these media need to be used in moderation, and energy production should be diversified. But there is only one hope for putting an end to the evil fossil fuel monster, and that is nuclear energy. In this epic battle, all the other modes of energy production will serve as sidekicks to nuclear.

"Nuclear energy means nuclear bombs"

Answer : A knife can be used for making dinner.

Nuclear power generation has one of the least established links for making nuclear bombs. All the bombs that have been made till now, have been made without a nuclear reactor being built for power generation. The very first nuclear bomb had been made in the Los Alamos laboratory of USA during the 2nd world war, before a nuclear power reactor was even ever conceived. It is true that a power reactor can be used for producing fissile material, but this method remains the most expensive and ineffective way of building a nuclear bomb. There are cheaper and quicker ways of making bombs, which are easier to conceal. No sane person would choose to build a power reactor for making bombs.

The only country to have used Plutonium from a (research) power reactor to build an explosive device was India, in the Smiling Buddha test of 1974. But this has to be looked upon as a wary reaction of India towards official recognition of China as a nuclear power in 1968 after the bitter war which happened in 1962.

Nuclear proliferation and bombs are scary, so we expect the international law to place proper safeguards against them. But there exist practically none today. The IAEA inspects the longwinding procedure of nuclear power generation in each country, for possible loopholes. It leaves all the other channels of building nuclear bombs royally open. We desperately need methods for preventing nuclear proliferation, and for rapidly diminishing the bombs already existing in the world. Carping against nuclear power is an idiocy that we can hardly entertain in the current moment.

Q u e s t i o n s O f O u r T i m e

I would like to summarize an amazing lecture by Michel Serres, which I had the fortune of listening to in person.

A society undergoes a complete upheaval when there is a transformation in the way information is organized. Most thinkers have assumed in the past that major societal changes will be brought forward by advances in hard technology - such as the steam engine, wind mills, electric bulb etc. This textbook version of history is not true. Infact, all the major changes are brought in by soft technology - the technology that deals with information and messages.

The history of human civilization so far, can be distinctly divided into 4 eras :

• Oral Era : All communication was done through speech
  
• Writing Era : After the discovery of a written script for language
  
• Printing Era : After the discovery of the printing press
  
• Computing Era : After the discovery of a machine to process and communicate information

Each of these advances brings a significant change in the way information, in the most general sense of the term, is handled by humans. These soft advances literally tear the world down, and a completely new order emerges in terms of politics, commerce, science, law, religion and culture. These six spheres crudely summarize the entire human activity. So let us understand what has happened.

Oral Era

Politics : The society is organized as tribal units, each governed by a collection of clan elders. The individual owes his loyalty to the tribe, as exemplified by race relations coded through genes.
Commerce : Commerce is done through barter. Gold and other precious metals serve as useful benchmarks for barter.
Science : Primitive theories try to explan natural phenomena. Making tools and weapons is considered an art. Education is provided purely within the family.
Law : Law is loosely conceptualized as the honour of the tribe and the family. Each person is required to defend this honour.
Religion : Animistic and polytheistic worship function as ways of attaining harmony with the world, and of explaining away troubling natural calamities.
Culture : Epics are weaved together by bards travelling across the land.

Examples : Vedic India (till 600 BC), ancient Greece before Pythagoras (till 580 BC), Europe before Rome (till 100-200 AD), societies of uneducated people who cannot read or write (40% of current India, 64% of current Afghanistan)

One word which defines state : Race

Writing Era :

Politics : State is invented, with a legal code written on stone (Ashoka's stone proclaimings, Hammurabi's code) The state has a physical boundary that has to be protected by an army. The government quickly develops into a monarchy with a hierarchical control of feudalism.
Commerce : Money is invented (a value written down on metal). A new mercantile class emerges which deals with money and commerce.
Science : Geometry is invented. Mathematics emerges and engineering is no longer an art. Natural phenomena are explained through observation and measurement. Education is provided by monasteries, and the notion of a teacher is born. Libraries are few and far in between. A teacher has to remember a lot.
Law : It is no longer unwritten family honour, but the written law of a state. A special class of policemen emerges to defend and enforce the law.
Religion : Monotheistic religions of a book emerge. Now written down into a strict set of rules, the belief system becomes static and resilient to change.
Culture : The artists are sponsored by the court of the king. A language emerges for writing down music. Art and sculpture are carefully studied with the exactness of measurements.

Examples : Pre-colonial India categorized by caste (till 1600 AD: Mauryas, Guptas, Chalukyas, Moghals), Pre-renaissance Europe categorized by class (till 1500 AD : Greece after Pythagoras, Rome), Tibet till 1950, Arabia till 1900, sections of contemporary India where caste is still strong.

One word which defines state : Religion

Printing Era :

Politics : Books spread knowledge, and the idea that "all men are equal". This gives birth to democracy - a representative government elected by the people. The world is divided into nations.
Commerce : Banking is invented. The notion of solvability and economic trustworthiness are born. Cheque and printed money give rise to the capitalist system of commerce.
Science : With printed books at hand, a teacher is no longer required to remember all the topics of instruction. Education begins in earnest, and the entire population gets educated. The scientific method is born, with the notions of experimental validation and support. Science explodes into a thousand new branches.
Law : The notion of a constitution is born. Religion gets separated from law.
Religion : "Every man is equal to the Pope, with the Bible at his hand", proclaims Luther and begins the Protestant reform in Europe. Religion becomes a private affair with no intermediate person. Church loses its power and monastic orders slowly disappear.
Culture : Art is viewed as a product in the market. The entire population gets to sponsor artists, through direct purchase of their art. A new class of middlemen emerges to control these means of distribution of art.

Examples : Modern Europe after renaissance, USA, Modern Japan, the educated middle class of developing countries (India, Brazil, China..)

One word which defines state : Market

Computing Era :

For the first time in human history, the entire world is connected at the distance of a mouse click. We are only entering this era. Just like the revolutions before, the entire world is about to be torn down. A new political and economic system is going to emerge, of a world without borders.

We can already trace some changes. In commerce, ATM and e-commerce have redefined the way of doing business. Globalization is changing the economic levers of the world. New economic frauds are surfacing, which will demand investigation towards new ways of doing business. In science and education, internet is begining to redefine the role of a teacher. Scientific exploration is at an exponential growth, through computational simulation and global collaboration. In law and politics, we need investigation into new ways of governing.

Here, I finish summarizing Serre's lecture. What follows are my own comments about the computing era. We need to ask bold questions : Can we get rid of representative government and usher in a new internet democracy? Can an individual be completely free ? Can the security of an individual be assured without violating privacy ? Can everybody be an artist ? Can an artist be assured of intellectual freedom without worrying about the economics of his business ?

These are the questions of our time.

Different parts of the world currently adhere to each of the above 3 eras. But ultimately, they all need to progress towards the 4th era. As we see clearly, each of these eras is antagonistic to the others. There will be a lot of resistance to change. As the era tries to fight back against its child, its uses the wisdom of its own battles with its father.

A society living in a religious writing-era conjures images of violence and lawlessness of its father, the oral-era. But the battle will be finally won, and it has to succumb to the capitalist printing-era.
Example : In 16th century Europe, the church has fought quite hard against democracy and secularism. It employed scare tactics, by frightening people that without monarchy and a strong church, there will be utter anarchy. In contemporary world, radical Islam frightens the believers that liberal democracy is kafir, equivalent to idolatry.

A society living in a capitalist printing-era conjures images of religious fundamentalism and monarchy of the writing-era, during its own battle with the computing-era.
Example : In fact, Europe, USA and Japan are fighting this very battle now. The right wing tries to poison the minds of the population about the battle against fundamentalist Islam. A scheming recording industry scares the people of internet piracy. The existing order tries its best to divert attention away from the questions of our time.

Before Michel Serres, another philosopher Karl Marx has attempted to a similar diagnosis of human society. But his theory of Marxism is as away from a correct diagnosis, as Lamarckism is away from Darwinism. Lamarck indeed had a revolutionary idea - that animals could change their form over the course of time. He theorized that the giraffe has just protruded its neck to catch the tall juicy leaves, and the neck just got longer and longer. But this is just not true. The unit of evolution is not the animal (phenotype) but the underlying gene (genotype).

Inspite of his courage in thinking of human society in a scientific manner, Marx had a wrong theory. He theorized that hard technology (phenotype) brings about societal changes instead of soft technology (genotype). Indeed, the communist philosophers of the Soviet Union just hoped that Lamarck had been true. Russia had been no capitalist country when the Bolsheviks imposed the socialist pattern. Neither had been China or Cuba, or any other communist country. The Russian communists aspired that, if only they pushed their necks long enough, they might catch the tall juicy leaves. But this is disastrously wrong. Each of these revolutions had been a retrograde step : killing a capitalist printing-era in favor of a monarchical writing-era. It is for this reason that communist countries exercise a severe censorship and thought control. It is unfortunate that Indian communists are still flaunting the same rubbish which has been tested by time to be utterly wrong.

The job of the progressives is to help the world get in terms with the technology, as quickly as possible. This would mean favoring a writing era over an oral era (religion over race), favoring a printing era over a writing era (market over religion) and favoring a computing era over a printing era (internet over market) - in the above order.

S n o w g r a p h

I have always been facinated by snow. The shape of a snowflake, its size, and the path it takes as it falls on the ground - each of this is the output of a complex mathematical equation that has thousands of variables. What would take a supercomputer a couple of hours to simulate is done by nature in a couple of seconds. And what more, there are billions of them snowflakes in one single day of snowfall. Each of them is uniquely beautiful.

After a long hiatus of 3 years, I resume to muse on this blog over the philosophy of snow. The topic of today's musings is what I call the snowgraph - the particular pattern describing which parts of the earth are covered by snow and which are not. Given a terrain with some variation of texture, windwardness and overboard traffic, nature solves a binary labeling problem - which parts of the terrain to cover with snow and which not.

The problem is interesting if the temperature of the earth is a little higher than freezing point, that is, so sufficiently high that a single isolated snowflake would melt away immediately after touching the ground. But when a crowd of snowflakes fall on the ground, a pattern will still emerge. The snowflakes will be floating islands of lower temperatures, sorrounded by a warmer ocean of atmosphere.

This accumulation of snow into a pattern will happen, if and only if the average frequency of a random snowflake hitting a portion of the terrain is higher than the time it takes on that terrain-portion for an averagely sized snowflake to melt away. Both the above variables depend on a complex assortium of factors such as the thermal conductivity of the terrain-portion, the windwardness of the terrain-portion and the thermal energy generated over the terrain-portion by traffic passing overboard (people/cars/water/..). Nonetheless, all these factors integrate with each other to produce the snowgraph. The snowgraph captures all the complex dynamics of this integration. This is nature's way of compressing information.

Now the interesting question is, can we discover the hidden forces that gave rise to the snowgraph (for example, by observing and analyzing an aerial photograph of the terrain) ? This is a fascinating piece of detective work. Given a photograph of a terrain in summer and in winter - one bare and one covered with snow, can we detect if either of them is fake ?

Most of the interesting questions of nature are of this kind. We have the snowgraph standing before us. But we have no idea why it is like that - why only parts of the terrain are covered with snow and why not the rest.

Why do we have five fingers on each limb ? Why do we have hair on top of the head but not on top of our palms ? Why are our palms soft and sinewy instead of hard and metallic ? Why do we have eyes on the top of the face, instead of having them over a prehensile object like our hands ? These are questions interesting not only to biologists, but also to roboticists who want to simulate these phenomena. Each of us is a snowgraph. Each custom in our society and culture is a snowgraph. Each object and each phenomenon in nature is a snowgraph - uniquely mysterious and uniquely beautiful.

The laymen amongst us abandon these mysteries and proceed with the daily routine. The believers amongst us give a ready answer - saying that it is God or whoever they believe in that did it all. But those few men amongst us who are bit by the curiosity bug, they dig deep and wide, and they unravel the mysteries of each snowgraph.

T h e P r i m a l R i g h t

Jimmy is drunk. He is been to the annual bacchanalia that happens in the local forest, in the name of remembering a certain sum of soldiers who died there during the war. A couple of bands perform guitar music to a crowd of jolly juveniles, who come there with the sole intent of having a good time. Apart from setting the crowd in spirit, this music disturbs the annual mating season of the marmots which live in those woods. Well, a couple of marmots going without sex does not weigh too much of a sacrifice as against those soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. Does it ? And ofcourse, there shall be no shortage within the crowd to pick up on that job of having sex, which the marmots have left unfinished.

Jimmy is drunk. He is already begining to see inanimate things do swing-dancing. Everything seems to have been jazzed up. The general size of the women's breasts seems to have gotten much bigger. He can hear his friends shouting his name, as they continue to deeper glories of alcoholism. Jimmy decides to take a stroll. He needs to ponder about the general outlook of his life in the safe precincts of numbed down mental powers, which otherwise would scare him off the above pursuit.

He finds a cosy tree away from din of the crowd, sets himself down, and commences the process of ruminating. He looks at his life, his job, his prospects in the near future, his personal life - everything seems glossy and gleaming. With a huge smile pasted on his face, he falls asleep.

In the middle of his slumber, he gets woken up by a loud conversation.

"So, you think he will get past his next birthday ?"

"Well, it is unlikely, but there is always a sliver of chance. You see, this chap Jimmy is born an idiot. He may not realize that he always has the right."

"Yes ofcourse. The primal right. But, two more years, that's what I will give him."

"Not even that, what does his life offer him ? An unending slew of disappointment, rejection, confusion. More disappointment. It is surprising how he still has not gotten to see the truth."

"Yes, the truth, that the whole world is just a pretence. That it is just an elaborate theater set up so that we can look at his misfortunes, laugh at them, and get our share of fun."

Jimmy is alarmed. He opens his eyes and sees two shadowy figures clad in black cloaks, standing next to the tree. It is their voices that have woken him up. He cannot see his friends or the rest of the partying crowd. He must have walked quite deep into the woods.

Suddenly, one of the cloaked figures turns towards him.

"Can't you see Jimmy ? Your life is just for us, a piece of entertainment. Nothing in this world actually exists. You are just being fooled by us, and how well you are being fooled."

Jimmy lowers his eyelids in terror, lest the two figures see that he is awake.

"Haven't you seen the game Jimmy - where they use bloodthirsty hounds to chase the rabbits. The silly rabbit runs maniacally, never wondering why it is getting chased, may be it is for somebody's pleasure. It never knows. Hasn't it ever occured to you Jimmy, that you are probably participating in a similar game yourself ?"

"Ahh. Let's leave it at that. This chap Jimmy is dumb to his bone. He will not realize, for example, that he will never find a girl that truly loves him."

"That is part of the script. Isn't it ?", chuckles the other figure.

"Yes. He is like a stale vegetable in a vegetable market. The one that always gets picked up by the customers, only to be tossed down with a deep scorn. The kind of vegetable that finally ends up in the trash."

"And he will never get true appreciation for anything."

"Poor Jimmy, he will never learn how to dance, he keeps trying, only to produce jeering laughs from everyone around."

"He will never play any sport properly. His friends keep him only because they are short of a person. They hate him and make jokes about him behind his back. ".

"He doesn't realize that his life is a big joke by itself."

"If only he can realize that he can end it all. That he can pull the plug."

"That is his primal right, isn't it ? The right that comes automatically for every creature. He doesn't realize it."

"No, but we have also kept too many hurdles behind that. He has to think about his family. He has to think about what hopes they have kept in him, only to be constantly depressed about how he is letting them down."

"Yes, he cannot pull the plug, but he so wants to. Oh Jimmy, but this is your primal right". The figure bends over Jimmy. It keeps its hands around his cheeks as if caressing him.

Jimmy feels himself getting asphyxiated. In silent horror, he sees his blood dripping away from his brain.

"Keep struggling Jimmy, I can see you are awake, but it is too late by now. You will soon be out of this misery. Let me handle you gently. "

Jimmy tries to shout, but he can hardly open his mouth.

After what seems like an eternity, he suddenly manages to spring to his feet.

"Hey listen, this is Jimmy, speaking for myself. I know about the primal right, but it is not about pulling the plug. It is not that obvious. It is the right to see and the right to speak. That is my fucking primal right. You cannot deny it from myself. I will live to see, and I will live to speak. "

Jimmy is staring into the wide eyes of his friends. It is bright sunlight now, and he is standing outside their tent. They are looking at him like he is the devil.

"What the devil, Jimmy ? What the hell are you talking about ?"

Jimmy looks back into the woods, "I was sitting under a tree, somewhere beyond those woods over there. I had a real bad nightmare, I cannot understand how I walked down here all by myself."

One of his friends says, "There are some strange woods down here, I heard that some of the trees discharge hallucinational substances at night, which get washed down by the dew. You look quite crazy Jimmy. Those bloody eyes look like they are ready to pop out any minute. Come in here, have a sip of water. "