There’s a wealth of humor to be mined from space. I mean, look at Space Force (the Steve Carrell version not Trumps’ toss-off) for example. (And come to think of it, both versions are parodies. I stand corrected. . .)
There’s also a wealth of wisdom, if we’re to believe this person. And to me, a whole wealth of other thoughts. But first, the article. Jane Poynter spent two years in Biosphere 2, and as she says it changed her: "Before I went into the Biosphere, I wasn't terribly interested in environmental and social causes. Afterwards? Completely…"
Two years here would be an incredible effort, and I can’t imagine it NOT changing my life profoundly. In a positive way for the environment, I’d imagine. Now imagine living there for a lifetime and seeing it once from the outside. I imagine that you’d realise how fragile it was, and I can agree that seeing Earth from space would turn me from a white Australian European descended person into an Earthling.
I aready do believe we ALL need to start thinking like Earthlings and realising that everything else from blue whales down to bacteria and slime molds are also Earthlings and they depend on us as much as we depend on them, and I generally try to live like one.
But it’s impractical for everyone to live in something like a Biosphere 2 for two years, and almost impossibly difficult to loft everyone into space for their life-changing glimpse of how beautiful the planet is despite our worst efforts to turn it into a shit-pile, and how incredibly fragile it also is.
Jeff Bezos recently went to space, alighted again and gushed about how beautiful and life-changing that viewpoint is. Jezz Bezos is also the second-richest person on the planet, vying with Elon Musk for the title of Earth’s first trillionnaire …
One thing I haven’t seen or heard is Jeff Bezos reaching into his almost-trillionnaire pants pocket and fishing out (say) ten billion to fund clean air or clean water or secure food supply for his fellow Earthlings. . .
I have just seen Elon Musk scrape some pocket change off his CFO’s desk and ativate Starlink satellites over Ukraine and send a truckload of Starlink terminal equipment. It’s a start . . .
I just recently mentioned that almost twenty years ago someone observed that Bill Gates’s personal fortune was such that he could have ended world hunger for ten years without making an appreciable dent in that fortune, and that he didn’t.
Australia’s Dick Smith - as a contrast - consistently donated his money and funded charities and charity events that raise hundreds of millions still. He never even attained the status of billionaire as far as I know. . .
So it seems that some people like Smith and Musk will be profoundly humanitarian without needing to go to space to prod them to, some need more than Google Earth to inspire them to, and some only go up there to plan how they’ll take the whole planet.
Which brings me to my next revelation - there ARE ways we can get most people to the edge of space and perhaps even beyond. It’s the best, sincerest, and most visceral method, and I suggest we implore every billionnaire and above that hasn’t donated to take the life-altering ride before all the common hoi polloi.
If they sign over a significant portion of their hoard for planetary restoration, we should even give them a parachute . . .
It’s a serious issue, parachutes aside. We’ve paid a lot of our income to their companies, income that has in most cases been hoarded and is sitting doing nothing. Now there are works that need to be done and none of us has that kind of money to spend - except those ultra-rich-super-duper-mega-wealthy types.
And they aren’t doing a whole lot of anything. It’s as if they don’t realise that without customers their source of income will dry up, their source of food and products will dry up, and they might live a while longer than the rest of us but then they’ll just die horrifically long, painful, and lonely deaths.
I tend to admire people like Elon Musk, who didn’t even own a house while he was building Space-X up and had so little personal income at the time that he had to do a whip-around of friends and family to pay the rent and bills. He basically lived at Space X in order to keep it growing. And the ultimate goal, to take humanity off the planet and into space, that’s a fantastic aspiration.
But it won’t do enough to focus the rest of us on saving the planet - after all, it might be us going to Mars once ‘the others’ have built a few habitable environments up there and made the place livable. But see? We ‘d then just go there and make a pile of rubbish out of Mars too because living there wouldn’t have the sort of impact that seeing Mars from space would supposedly bring. . .
There’s one other thing that needs to be considered: Scientists have already proven that homo sapiens will not survive a life in space without severe health problems and possibly death. Mars’ atmosphere won’t offer much more protection from the radiation than a spacecraft’s hull, so Mars or orbital stations, we won’t survive without evolving into a more suited form.
Homo caelum will be a very different creature and we’d need to overcome a lifetime distrust of genetic manipulation to come up with a human that will survive those rigors, and our inborn distrust of the different.
If you want to know how I think it’ll go, let me ask you if you’ve watched the space opera “The Expanse” - I think that show is a very optimistic viewpoint indeed.
But I’ll live in hope that we’ll recover the planet, and take space one small step at a time.
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