From the utilisation of the discovery of combustion to harness the power of fire, to inventing highly volatile nuclear missiles that are capable of devastating entire supercities and killing millions of innocent civilians, we, as human beings, have always thought that we are unconquerable.

However, our feeling of impregnability was recently deemed false when a minute organism, inconceivable to the human eye, forced us, the omnipotent beings that we thought we were, to cocoon ourselves in our own homes. At a time when we believed that the only conceivable threat to our survival was ourselves, a new being has surfaced to not only frighten us, but to humble us.

This is a time for us to reflect and think about what we as a united species can do, not only for us and other living beings, but also the environment, whose suffering we have so heartlessly ignored. It is not enough for us to think about how we can redeem ourselves when we are faced with the prospect of immanent death; we should firstly stop setting aside what we can do now to do later, such as investing in technology to combat future illnesses and developing ways of decreasing or even eliminating our negative effect on the environment.

Let us act now to prevent a future disaster.