Pale Blue Dot 4 comments

26 Sep 2005 @ 16:15, by Uncle Remus "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ---Carl Sagan, 1934-1996 "Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It's very widespread in some parts of the world...We would like to see, from the astronauts' point of view, people take good care of the Earth and replace the resources that have been used." ---Astronaut Eileen Collins, from the shuttle Discovery, 220 miles above Earth, 08/04/05 Spaceship Earth: the concept is not new. It first came about in the early 60's as a metaphor for understanding our planet as a closed-life support system. Using the same SF analogy one may talk of our civilization in the same way. Our civilization (i.e. the world that mankind has created for itself) can be envisioned as a space vessel, and our current modern global "economy," as its engine. But, as it turns out, something is fundamentally flawed with the engine. Its design has serious and devastating effects on the environment (for the purpose of our SF metaphore let say that it distorts the space continuum or some such thing.) Obviously, the engine should be turned off, or replaced. The conundrum is that if the occupants of the ship turn the engine off (i.e. the economy), the spaceship (i.e. our current civilization as we know it) will collapse with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences in so far as what remains of the fragile fabric of the space-time continuum is concerned. Furthermore, turning the engine off is nearly impossible as it would require the willing cooperation of all parties concerned and this is not about to happen. Consumerism, the source of the problem, also happens to be the carburant that the engine is running on, and no one knows what else to feed the engine. Nations don't trust each other. And the engine has grown so complex that the world economists have no idea how they would go about shutting it down anyway. Amongst the occupants of the ship, some hope that our scientists will succeed where our economists have failed, and that technology will evolve to the point where the current damages to the environment can be stopped and even reversed. It is an awkward balancing act, as it places our civilization in the position of a person who has tripped over a rock and hopes and tries to catch his or her balance by running faster and faster. Those who have experienced this know that, more often than not, the outcome is far from certain, especially if one is running in the dark and there might be a cliff somewhere in the distance. Those are interesting times we are living. 1. The Maya calendar/ 2012 people say it doesn't matter because humanity is on its way to one helluva transformational vibrational wallop and by 2012 we will all have transcended the space-time continuum. In order for this to happen we must all think positively because our thoughts control our reality. They believe that it is counterproductive to delve on the problems with the engine or to try to fix them. 2. Some people amongst certain political circles say, "What problem?" There is no problem, the engine is running just fine. And they produce some scientific experts of their own who will write articles for them saying that there is no distortion in the space-time continuum and that any report to the contrary is part of some vast left-wing conspiracy whose aim is to seize control of the ship. 3. The religious right says it's not up to man to think of such things. God will provide. What is meant to happen will happen regardless of what man tries to do. It's all written in the Bible. The end is foretold and we all know that things are going to get much, much worse (the tribulations) before the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. So the quicker things get worse fast, the better. 4. The transhumanists believe that the progressive transformation of the human condition, especially through technological means, will enable mankind to deal with the engine and fix it before it's too late. They expect that humanity will evolve to a degree where the limitations of the plane will soon become irrelevant anyway. 5. Some say, none of this matter. It's not the ship that matters but the journey. 6. Some people say there is no ship. 7. Some people say there is no space-continuum. 7. Etc. People say a lot of things. Ultimately, what is of interest is not what people say. It's what people actually do. Or what people say can be done, that can actually be done. And so, what's surprising is that seemingly no more has been done. It is almost as if people had been lulled into believing that the laws of the market and doing things as usual will eventually take care of the problem (through scientific innovation and human ingenuity), forgetting, perhaps, that the laws of the market and doing things as usual is precisely what created the mess we are in, in the first place. I don't know, perhaps a healthy reaction would be to acknowledge that there is a problem in the first place. Maybe make it a matter of National Emergency with some kind of Homeland Security Advisory System for the environment along with a Color-Coded Threat System of its own, perhaps? The Living Planet Index shows average trends in populations of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species worldwide. It declined by about 40 per cent from 1970 to 2000. Like, Elevated = Yellow; High = Orange; Severe = Red. Aaaah, but would that be good for the Economy, now?

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