Aliens in everyday life

The photo above shows a young cuckoo, fed by a much smaller parent bird. The situation seems absurd, as the offspring is about three times the size of the parent. In comparison that would mean that a human would face a child with a body weight of 180 kg, when the child is five years old. Imagine, it would be like an alien from outer space suddenly had been invading your privacy. Also imagine the size of the household food budget and you realise that your present occupation will not do. You will have to become a Member of the European Parliament.

Modern life provide us with a flora of possibilities of looking into the remote future. What we see as extreme today might be viewed as trivial in the future. People might weigh on average about 150 kg, a hundred years from now. That is pretty much what happened in Japan, though on a smaller scale, when the sumo wrestlers found that they were competing with Hawiians and Mongolians to a larger extent. These "aliens" had an ability to put on more body weight than the Japanese wrestlers and therefore had a competitive advantage. A good big guy. almost always beats a good small guy. Although the opposite happened in the latest contest held in late May 2009, when the smaller Mongolian sumo wrestler D. Byambadorj won the contest's final against his bigger and older Mongolian competitor. Not to imply that I think that Mongolian sumo wrestlers are the cuckoos of Japanese sumo.

Fatness, thiness, fitness and body weight are interesting phenomena and what the future will show us in that respect one can only guess. To my knowledge the world record in body weight for males is cloose to 500 kg... then there is only one solution, we must join the whales... in the sea...

Note: To really appriciate this blog you have to know that the cuckoo puts its eggs into the nests of other birds and let them feed its offspring. Some birds are cheated, while others are not. The photo was from WWF EKO 2 2009, and the photo of the Mongolian wrestler was taken from the Mongolian newspaper Önöödör 2009 May 26.