I always feel such a sense of disgust for the "we should leave Earth, it’s the only hope for humanity"-style of propaganda movies and TV shows.
"We’ll terraform and colonize another planet!"–My dudes: You can’t even help keep Earth habitable, and it’s the planet we are adapted to live on.
Or the whole "The Earth is going to become a barren wasteland… We must create biodomes on other planets or moons, and we must take everything we need with us when we leave Earth" idea. Which is basically colonizer talk for "We need to rip out all the resources and leave Earth a desolate hull so that we, the rich, can live in miserable hovels on non-habitable planets. Its the only hope for humanity!" Which kind of handwaves the 8 billion people and all the animals that are going to DIE as a result.
I look at the kinds of people gazing up at the stars as the future for everything, and that who completely believe they will someday live as royalty on some other planet, and I am disgusted.
Not because they dare to dream. But that they see the cost of their dream as being the lives and wellbeing of everyone and everything else on this planet… and they shrug it off as a minor inconvenience. As a bit of nothing to be paid as long as they get where they want to go.
Meanwhile, Earth might very well be the only true home that humanity ever has.
We evolved on Earth. We evolved to survive in Earth-like conditions, and the likelihood of finding everything we need somewhere else is next to nil.
There is a reason there doesn’t seem to be large life out there on other worlds. There’s a reason we don’t gaze out and see the flickering lights of other civilizations reflecting back at us.
Because if they exist, they are so far away that we will never meet them as the universe continues to expand outward and away.
Because the lucky chances that all added up together to create a planet with all the requirements for life to evolve were so astronomical that to think they would be replicated on a planet close enough for us to ever reach… is fantasy.
We may not be alone in the universe. But we are remarkably lucky to have a planet that can maintain life. We are the blessed ones.
So to watch and listen to all those people talking about pissing everything we have away for the DREAM of being a God-Emperor-KING of some colony out in space… It’s grotesque.
Because you can dream of living on a Martian colony. You can make up the plans for biodomes on the moon, or space stations circling high above the Earth. WITHOUT destroying everything we already have.
You don’t have to take away from billions of other living people and the countless generations to follow. You don’t have to cause the extinction of all other life on the planet. Simply to imagine yourself as being able to have SOMETHING else.
We are on the cusp of a future that can be gloriously bright or a dismal despair. We passed the point of no return when we refused to stop polluting and caused the melting of essential ice. But that doesn’t mean the fight should end.
It means we must fight HARDER to reverse the damages humanity has caused. We must strive further and reach farther to make things better. To fix what was done in the past and prevent the harms of the future.
We have been given guardianship of a planet that provides EVERYTHING we need to live and thrive. And while others have abused and desecrated that great trust… Those of us that wish to see the future must raise our voices, change our actions, and save what is to protect what will be.
This Earth might be all we ever have. It will definitely be all that most of us will know.
Because while the wealthy dream of rocket ships to other planets where they will rule over a slave-class of workers… the rest of us will be left behind to die in the wreckage they have made.
And that disgusts me.
~Harper Kingsley
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I saw like a NowThis video of a solar panel setup in, I think, California, that is able to filter fresh water out of fouled water.
The solar panels absorb the sunlight and make energy enough to power a whole city, and as a part of that they create a great deal of heat. Using that heat, they’re able to pump in fouled water and condense it into clean water.
With a setup in someplace sunny and hot like Arizona or countries like Africa or India… communities will be able to provide electricity AND drinking water.
I’m not sure how much a setup would take to build, but it’s one of those things where billionaires wasting their money on stupid shit could ACTUALLY be helping both the human race and animals.
I was seeing the good works that the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (https://sheldrickwildlifetrust.org) is doing in Kenya. They protect the animals from poachers, and rescue like elephants and warthogs and other animals from the terrible drought conditions that are leaving the infants orphaned.
Every day they go out to their many manmade watering holes and they fill them up with life-giving water. They provide bales of lucerne (alfalfa) to feed the different animals that are starving in the untenable conditions. They are doing AMAZING work funded by the donations of people that care about saving animals.
If they had access to fresh water and electricity, they could only do more good. Because they are good people.
Meanwhile, there are a few people with near limitless resources that are SQUANDERING what they have on pure selfishness. Because they lack the imagination and self-awareness to picture themselves doing anything good.
They dream of boarding rocket ships and flying off into the stars. To live as kings on other planets in the same way that they’ve lived as kings on Earth.
It is a lack within themselves. An emptiness in their own souls. Because while they see themselves as "great men," they are actually the smallest kind of people. One-dimensional cutouts that dream they are greater than they actually are, while completely empty of anything of worth.
They are small people in a big world, and they don’t even know it. A speck on a grain of sand, washed away by time, on an Earth that will continue to move on without them.
They are nothing. And they will always be nothing. Because their dreams are as shallow and empty as they are.
