08.27.08

Spaceship Earth: No second chance

Posted in Environment at 4:44 pm by Anthony

Consider the following situation. Four months into an eighteen month mission to Mars, NASA begins to receive disturbing reports of disunity among the crew. There is disagreement between the astronauts as to how resources like food, water and fuel should be utilised.

Some crew members are consuming with abandon claiming that there is more than enough to last the trip while others want to follow a careful strategy of conservation in order to ensure survival. Unfortunately, despite receiving several warnings from NASA, the over-consumers gain the upper hand and the squandering continues.

Could humans be so stupid? A recent UN sponsored report concluded that almost two thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by humans. It further warned that the wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged.

In other words, spaceship Earth is living beyond its means and is heading into serious trouble unless the crew can unite in taking radical action. But, as we know, unity among humans is rare and we have never managed to unite on a global scale.

The first step for the crew of spaceship Earth must be to develop an extraterrestrial mental attitude. That is, we must learn to think like astronauts do when they are isolated in deep space with no second chance if they are stupid enough to waste limited resources or neglect machinery vital to survival. Always uppermost in their minds is the fact that the craft they inhabit is the only protection they have against total extinction.

The difficulty is that most humans are unaware that they actually are crew members of an intergalactic spacecraft. This is principally because our everyday sense is of living on a very large planet that is unconnected with greater space. The reality is very different.

Earth is a spacecraft with a diameter of only 7,926 miles spinning on its axis at about 1,000 miles per hour and speeding around the sun at over 65,000 miles per hour. It is a tiny component of a solar system that is itself moving around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy at about 155 miles per second, taking approximately 250 millions years to complete one rotation.

It can be seen, therefore, that we are living on a very small spacecraft with very limited resources, speeding through a vast and hostile universe.

Given that we are decades if not centuries away from being able to exploit the vast resources of nearby space, it is vital that we conserve and maintain in good working order the ‘machinery of nature’ that is so crucial to our survival.

If we fail, and to date we are failing, there is no possibility of outside help, no hope of rescue or re-supply. We will become a dead planet drifting silently through intergalactic space.

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