 |
| GJ667Cc, the latest ark of man |
Celebrity physicist, Stephen Hawking,
wrote recently that
homo sapiens hope to avoid extinction is to spread itself into space. Perhaps this sort of thinking is why every discovery of a
possibly inhabitable planet is reported in the mass media regardless of how many light years away it is. Given the state of man's technology any number of light years is a light year too far, now and for the foreseeable future. Exploration has played an important role in our civilization. Without question we are the globally dominant species, but with dominance comes responsibility. This writer is not advocating "lurking" on the planet with our large brain inserted into the sand while waiting for a supernatural rescue, but brave new world escapism is counter-productive to man's survival on planet Earth in
US Person's humble opinion. Man's survival strategy should be focused on living with Earth in a harmonious way. First and foremost that means controlling his population currently at 7 billion and rising, and curtailing the fouling of the primal resources that make this planet inhabitable, air and water. Abuse of the environment has caused the extinction of great civilizations in the past and it could cause our own despite our advanced technology. In the very long term Earth's climate has gone
rogue, but prior events such as ice ages and global warmings are thought to have geological or even cosmological causes. We as a species may not be extant or still resident to witness our sun's red giant phase and the
Earth's inevitable incineration billions of years hence. Since our species first began to walk upright, an evolution that took millions of years, we are faced with the possibility of man's civilization so
affecting his home's natural processes that he may cause his own demise before he can voyage to the stars. Because it is man's activity, it can be changed. Only the will to do so is not yet sufficient. Dreaming of distant planets and new worlds to exploit is exciting given our biology, but migration into space is not a viable solution to the problem of our own extinction. Taking care of our nest is.
