100 YEARS OLD AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE AND PAST...

ALARMED at a front page headline in this paper last week revealing that 200 people are sneaking into Britain illegally every day, I rushed to my computer to do some calculations.

If the rate of 200 people a day continues, it will take only another 102,669 years for 7.5 billion people to have sneaked in, which is the entire world population.

We do not, of course, know what is going to happen to the world population over that time. Population growth may continue, or a worldwide epidemic or nuclear war or being hit by a stray asteroid may reduce it dramatically. But in the absence of reliable predictive data, I decided to stick with the 7.5 billion figure.

Until the 1920s, of course, it would have been possible to fit the entire world population standing up on the Isle of Wight. Since then however the world population has almost quadrupled while the Isle of Wight has remained much the same size.

If we tried to fit the entire world population there, each person would get only 506 square centimetres, which is only 84 per cent of the area of an A4 sheet of paper. The Isle of Skye however covers more than four times the area of the Isle of Wight and everyone would fit there quite comfortably, especially if we wedged babies and short people around the legs of vertically gifted individuals.

So to deal with this crisis, at least for the next 100,000 years or so, I would suggest that we redirect all who wish to come here to the Isle of Skye where there will be plenty of room for them all. To understand the full nature of the problem however we need to see it all in a historical perspective.

According to research published in the journal Nature last year, recently discovered genetic evidence suggests that some members of Homo sapiens left the African continent around 100,000 years ago. This conclusion came from the analysis of the remains of a Neanderthal of that vintage found in Siberia. His DNA was found to contain traces of Homo sapiens DNA, suggesting that African immigrants had mated with the Siberian locals.

At the time, of course, the UK was joined to the European mainland, but we must clearly have been aware of the number of potential immigrants heading for the Isle of Wight via Siberia, as we let the waters flow in down the North Sea and across the English Channel combining the ideas of Brexit and Trump’s wall to cut Britain off at least until boats had been invented and a proper transport infrastructure could be put in place to take people to the Isle of Wight.

We are still struggling a bit with the transport business in the south of England but the need to shift plans to the Isle of Skye renders that irrelevant. Some sort of high speed train link will be necessary, I imagine, but I believe some such plan is already in place.

It has taken 100,000 years for our Homo sapiens ancestors to grow sapient enough to appreciate the lure of our island and we now have 100,000 more years to deal with it. My rallying cry as ever is, “Reach for the Skye.”