Our planet Earth, Gaia in Greek, considered as a living being, regularly corresponds with another planet in the universe, Aurora Kepler 452 B in the constellation of the Swan. Gilles Voydeville makes us discover this magnificent interstellar correspondence.
From Gaia to Aurora
My dear Aurora
I always enjoy reading you, because your thoughts are so close to mine that they seem to echo my thoughts. I have the impression that they are reflected by this wall of basalt, olivine, silicate and carbonaceous chondrite dust that forms our asteroid ring between the red planet and my great Jupiter. This strange zodiacal light that I see along the plane of the ecliptic is the work of the families of Flora, Coronis and so many others, but I know that Kirkwood’s lacunae pierce this wall and that you are my muse Echo, the one who advises me and comforts me to survive this silence, to endure the relentless immensity and to suffer this sidereal solitude that has always been the thing I have had the most difficulty to accept.
Your advice prevents me from having dark thoughts, from thinking of leaving in a spinning top to crash into another planet. To finally get rid of all these madnesses, these anxieties and these worries that have kept me from going round for so long. Often I get tired and I don’t want to fight anymore. What is the point of all this? How sweet it must be to fear neither the past nor the present nor the future. To let oneself sink into nothingness without fearing the idea of it, to be able to finally enjoy a peace without project and without duty. Before disappearing, to have the wisdom not to worry any more about the image that I will leave. For everything will end one day and nothing will remain, nothing of my sins, nothing of my exploits, nothing of my life. Wishing for absence like Charming wishes for heaven. Not wanting to feel anything anymore. Finally, yes finally, to acquire this serenity, the Serenity, that the living state always makes glimpse but provides so little. Yes, I believe it, death will please me.
…as soon as they make me suffer too much
Finally… I will try to live a little longer. Because the attraction of the aftermath is not yet enough for me to dare to resolve it. When my problems are immense, I comfort myself by thinking of disappearing, by telling myself that I can always end them as soon as they make me suffer too much. This morbid project is an escape that paradoxically allows me to fight against the despair that often overwhelms me. I can always take out this joker to whistle the end of the game. Without having to suffer the agony of defeat, the torture of regrets and the pain of injuries.
Since I am still here, my duty is to solve the problems of my people.
At this moment, I regain my strength by admiring the spring foliage of my northern hemisphere. For a few days, the trees are covered with the most beautiful finery that my land can offer.
In Japan, the Charmants have elevated the contemplation of cherry blossoms to a discipline, Hanami, which oscillates between meditation and aesthetics.
In America and Europe, it is the diaphanous hawthorn bushes that soothe the gaze of the walker, or the crimson blossoms of prunus that blend with the pink leaves to intoxicate the passerby.
The apple trees with their fine membranes spotted with white tulle and sprinkled with carmine, the creamy pear trees, the sorb trees with their hydrangea inflorescence, the alisiers with their pearly bouquets, all these fruit trees make waltzes of petals in the first winds of spring that give way to snowy storms.
As for the magnolias, they bend under their tropical bird feathers made of pink organza tepals like flamingos. They are resplendent with thousands of bouquets that even the craziest kings could not offer to the most desirable queens. Then they fly away at the first gust of wind and swirl like a giboulée that one would like to see, on wedding days, honouring the parvis of the churches.
Ah, these moments are magical.
After these agrarian digressions, I must return to your story of the right of ovoid females. It reminds me of my charming females. But I don’t want to epilogate because, when one is not a Charming herself, it is too sensitive a subject for one to bring a touch of judgment to it that would not be admissible as a stranger to this condition. So I fall back into uncertainty. And this uncertainty brings me back to why I want to solve everything. Rather than letting everything go to waste.
“Coco loves the virus
Fortunately, my little virus crowned with this beautiful diadem has not yet disappeared and is even thriving. And this in spite of the vaccination, which is not bothering him much at the moment. I have the impression that he has found a third wind. This rascal knows how to vary and makes variations. As it is still circulating a lot, it increases its chances of mutating. Because the more it circulates and contaminates, the more it reproduces, and the greater the probability of error in the transcription of its genome by the billions of replication factories that are the billions of charming cells. These errors create mutants that Charmant calls “variants”.
They have the merit of being less or not recognized by the immune defense systems of Charmants already infected or even vaccinated.
It would seem, according to Nature which is a charming scientific journal not at all natural, that the ruffled variant of the English and the frizzy one of the South Africans are still sensitive to the current vaccines, but that the Brazilian P1 requires much more antibodies to be neutralized and would expose to reinfections. For the latter, there would be a lower efficacy of vaccination. However the Amazonian is not more lethal than during the peak of the first epidemic in April during my previous rotation around my Sun. But the unrestrained circulation has allowed each region of Brazil to see the birth of nice variants – there are 92 of them so far – including the P2 that coos in Copacabana, and the P4 that dances the bossanova in Belo Horizonte.
Because of the lack of respect of barrier measures, my viruses are still circulating and it is likely that they will find relays in other animals. “Coco likes the virus, Coco likes the virus, Coco likes the virus, Coco…”. Thus pampered by the shimmering language of the parrots, just as they are welcomed in their bosom, my small cherished viruses will be able to measure themselves against other defenses, other replications, imperfect but which will be, I hope, again aggressive when they will come back to visit my Charming.
A political weapon for governments in danger
What bothers me is that Charming is beginning to understand that children must be vaccinated. Because if they are resistant to the disease to the point of being infested but having few or no clinical signs, they are nonetheless magnificent transmitters. And if Charmant vaccinates them – this vaccination lowers the accommodation and thus the contagiousness – he will clog my beautiful machine that I created to slow down his hegemony.
Fortunately, not all peoples have understood this yet. Only the Finns have realized it. But they have been joined by the Israelis who have realized it with their global vaccination plan – the flaw is that they forgot to vaccinate their neighbors who work in their country, the Palestinians – and the British, who are doing everything they can to show the rest of Europe that they were right to leave it while monopolizing the vaccines produced on this same European continent.
Mass vaccination has become a political weapon for governments in danger.
Concerning the defenses put in place by Charmant against my little virus, what worries me a little more is the lymphocyte response. It seems to be quite durable. As you know, the response to a viral attack is done in two ways: by the so-called humoral way of production of antibodies by the T lymphocytes which is generated by the disease or the vaccines. And by the cellular route, that of the B lymphocytes. Patients who have been infected have B lymphocytes with a specific memory of the Spike protein that binds the virus to the cell. If they encounter Spike, the B cells turn into plasma cells and secrete neutralizing antibodies. The charming researchers of the Mondor Institute have shown that at the moment the population of B lymphocytes targeting the Spike protein was increasing more than that of the other lymphocytes targeting the other coronaviruses, the so-called seasonal beta viruses, which give small colds but do not protect against my tiara crown.
Awarded a Nobel Prize
What worries me even more is a study by the big New York bank J.P. Morgan Chase, which is always trying to be ahead of the game in order to invest or disinvest before others and make more profit. This study shows that from a small percentage of the population vaccinated, no more than 15 or 20%, there is a protection of the charming population against my little tiara-crowned virus. This will certainly stop my pandemic and I will have to find more effective ways.
As I wrote to you earlier, Charming research is being launched all over the place and I am afraid that it will serendipitously discover other treatments for cancers and rare diseases. As proof of this, Charming is starting to exploit RNA interference (RNAi) which has already won a Nobel Prize. As you know, recently the great revolution of vaccines was made by injecting a messenger RNA that makes the Charming cells produce directly antibodies against Covid. Well, with interfering RNA, it is the injection of an RNA that represses the expression of a gene that is harmful to the charming body. An award called the Prix Galien has just distinguished the RNAi treatment of a very serious disease, hereditary amyloidosis. If even these genetic diseases can be treated, I don’t see how I’m going to regulate all this little world anymore.
The leader of my pretty little viruses
I keep confidence in my little crowned one. Because he knows how to vary, he knows how to mutate in a thousand ways. In fact, as I said before, it is not him who changes, but it is the trillions of factories of his reproduction which sometimes make mistakes and make mistakes by producing viruses imperfectly identical to their models.
These imperfect replicas, these variants, are already quite numerous because there are more than 16,000 mutations on my planet since the beginning of my pandemic.
As the wise Darwin explained, they are the play of non-deterministic chance, that is to say that, contrary to what I would like, my viruses have no purpose. These mutants are very often not very effective in infecting other lovely cells. But on the number, some of them can prove to be very adapted to deceive Charming’s defense system. And those, or rather the one that is best adapted, will eventually win.
The example of the moment is that English variant I was telling you about, which has gone from being anecdotal, a minority, to the perfect leader of my pretty little viruses. When it started in Great Britain, it made the Charming Ones of the European continent smile with ease and see it as a punishment of the British pride for having snubbed them and left them like a family they had never really loved. And then this variant crossed the Channel and soon supplanted everywhere on my bark those viruses reputed to be nastier for the health of Charming than the African or the Brazilian P1 variant, more lethal but less transmissible. Some consider that the so-called English variant is an evolution of my little crowned one, natural and that if this variant hatches so quickly everywhere, it is not only the fruit of the inter-personal transmission or a jump over the Channel, but especially the convergence towards a final form. Which fortunately is perhaps not yet reached because it is not effective enough!
Better regulation of industrial pollution
In Moselle, which is a small territory in France, the British have eliminated the Afrikaner, which was well established, nastier but less contagious. And this delicious British virus is today the dominant one in Moselle, as everywhere in France for that matter. So much so that in this country, which has recently reached records of 50,000 contaminations per day, a kind of general confinement with a stop of the schools has been decreed again.
In another register, I learned what the Charmants of Geneva published in “Earth Systems and Environment”: pollution peaks, whether by industrial pollutants or by sandstorms with fine particles of 2.5 micrometers, would accompany contamination peaks. Perhaps this will encourage my tender creatures, my charming creatures, to think about better regulating industrial pollution.
As for the place of birth of my crowned, everyone knows it except the midwives.
One does not finish to be ecstatic about the goodwill of the Chinese government. The Chinese Charming are still surprised that the whole world attributes them the maternity of this birth whereas they did nothing which can support it… By dint of undergoing the international pressure, their government finally agreed that an investigation of experts is diligent on the spot to clarify the mysterious appearance of my small darling.
As it is a serious government, it has prepared the visit well. Nothing was left to chance. Any revelation of a Chinese Charming that could involve their great country is punishable by imprisonment. Any publication already published that does not corroborate the official line disappears. The announcement in Nature on November 17, 2020 by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that the genetic sequences of the viruses collected at the Mojang mine would soon be published has not been followed up. The professor who returned seven times to the site found nothing at all. What a self-sacrifice for an academic to search, to search and to insist, without discovering viruses close to my little SARS-Cov2! What’s more, she works for the pure pleasure of working.
All this has finally annoyed Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, who said he would investigate the hypothesis of a Chinese laboratory accident, the one in Wuhan, which is so close to the market, not to mention it.
Because the WIV database, which contains thousands of viral sequences, has been taken offline…
Tomorrow, one missile too many
Ah, I think my world is not done with wars and this will replace my pandemic to keep a reasonable number of people on my planet. Because the eastern world is growing in power and the western world will not let it. This is the trap of Thucidyde, named after the ancient historian who noted the fear of the Lacedemonians of seeing Athens grow in order, they thought, to supplant them. It is the paranoia of the first facing the hubris of the second. In general, for the explosion to occur, an external element is needed to light the fuse of the powder keg. In 1914, it was the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo. Tomorrow, it could be the missile awkwardly fired by North Korea, the precipitous interposition of NATO troops against the invasion of Ukraine by Donbass troops or a small Israeli atomic bombing on Iranian territory…
In short, I don’t have to worry too much about my overpopulation which will soon find an internal solution.
So that’s my dear Aurora, my last thoughts. My regulator is doing well and I just learned that it has become very efficient in India and that I hope it will bypass the messenger RNA vaccines. We will see.
I hope to hear good news about your Ovoids which seem to be threatened by the Transparents. But as you reminded me, given the gravity of the moment, the populists will be there to set the record straight.
Believe in my infinite understanding and in my most tender wishes.
Your Gaia