By Berl Falbaum
I have been mesmerized by space travel since its beginning and copies of the famous photo, Earthrise, taken by Astronaut William (Bill) Anders on December 24, 1968, has been hanging on the walls of my office and home since it was distributed.
I have never tired looking at it. It continually leaves me in awe. The beauty!
Thus, I could feel my heart beat increase as I watched Artemis II take off for its 10-day mission around the moon. And I wished the four astronauts on board Godspeed.
But, at the same time, I have been distressed by a contradiction and irony.
Here we are working to make the unhabitable (the moon, Mars) habitable for humans while we making the habitable (Earth) uninhabitable.
While the first objective is decades away, the latter is approaching quickly; it is a fait accompli; there is no avoiding the disaster for the planet.
The actor, William Shatner, who, at age 90, was on a sub-orbital space flight — Blue Origin NS-18 — in 2021, was interviewed as Artemis took off, and he explained how much he was moved by the beauty of the Earth.
Then, he added quickly, how depressed and dismayed he was at the speed with which are destroying it.
Here is a short list of what we face:
• First, population growth. You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that, given the problems we are experiencing at eight billion on the planet, any growth will be devastating.
• It is too late to cool the Earth. The present temperature increases are caked-in. Even passionate environmentalists have accepted an increase of temperatures to 1.5° Celsius, which is about 0.4 tenths more than we have experienced since the beginning of the pre-industrial revolution (around the mid-1800s).
• We can’t stop the melting of glaciers and the subsequent rising of the oceans that are drowning populated islands as I write this.
• Rainforests, the “lungs of the Earth,” so vital to our survival because they absorb CO2 are being destroyed daily. Haiti alone has lost 98 percent of its rainforests.
• Then we have water, soil, air pollution not to mention water shortages in much of the world. Eight hundred million people — 1 in 10 — do not have access to clean water.
• More than a million animals and plants are threatened with extinction, according to scientific studies.
• Plastics are suffocating us. In 1950, we manufactured two million tons of plastic. We are approaching the manufacture of 500 million tons -- that’s 500
million tons. Microplastics have been found in human brains and blood. We are a Great Lakes state and 22 million tons of plastic are dumped in these lakes
annually. Seventeen billion pounds go into the oceans each year.
• We cannot, it’s impossible, to cleanup our oceans, lakes, streams and other waterways. One scientist, testing a new submarine, found plastic trash bags at 36,000 feet below the surface, the deepest anyone has ever gone.
If you drive an SUV, consider it contains about 400 pounds of plastic.
• We are experiencing rage fires and wind storms around the world, the likes of which we have never seen before.
And, I might stress, these are just a few highlights — more accurately, lowlights.
(Incidentally, we are polluting space as well. NASA itself has stated that there are 6,000 tons of materials in Low Earth Orbit, making it the “world’s largest garbage dump.” The International Space Station has had to initiate evasive maneuvers on many occasions to avoid crashing into this “junk.”)
Anyone who believes we can solve all the problems makes Pollyanna look like a pessimist.
It is not in the cards. The political will does not exist to tackle these issues nor do the economics.
There have been 30 annual international environmental summits called the Conference of Partners (COP) since 1995 and each year the environmental situation was worse than the previous meeting.
Lots of passionate speeches, promises and pledges. Never any follow up.
In 1994, Carl Edward Sagan, astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, and science communicator, wrote a book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” (Random House). In it, he included a photo of the Earth taken, in 1990, from some 3.75 billion miles from Earth by the space probe, Voyager 1. The Earth appears the size of a pinhead. Sagan concludes his description of the photo with the following:
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Sadly, Sagan’s hope and wish have fallen on deaf ears.
In his essay, he also observed: “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
How right he was. There is a word for doing it to ourselves: Suicide.
I have never tired looking at it. It continually leaves me in awe. The beauty!
Thus, I could feel my heart beat increase as I watched Artemis II take off for its 10-day mission around the moon. And I wished the four astronauts on board Godspeed.
But, at the same time, I have been distressed by a contradiction and irony.
Here we are working to make the unhabitable (the moon, Mars) habitable for humans while we making the habitable (Earth) uninhabitable.
While the first objective is decades away, the latter is approaching quickly; it is a fait accompli; there is no avoiding the disaster for the planet.
The actor, William Shatner, who, at age 90, was on a sub-orbital space flight — Blue Origin NS-18 — in 2021, was interviewed as Artemis took off, and he explained how much he was moved by the beauty of the Earth.
Then, he added quickly, how depressed and dismayed he was at the speed with which are destroying it.
Here is a short list of what we face:
• First, population growth. You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that, given the problems we are experiencing at eight billion on the planet, any growth will be devastating.
• It is too late to cool the Earth. The present temperature increases are caked-in. Even passionate environmentalists have accepted an increase of temperatures to 1.5° Celsius, which is about 0.4 tenths more than we have experienced since the beginning of the pre-industrial revolution (around the mid-1800s).
• We can’t stop the melting of glaciers and the subsequent rising of the oceans that are drowning populated islands as I write this.
• Rainforests, the “lungs of the Earth,” so vital to our survival because they absorb CO2 are being destroyed daily. Haiti alone has lost 98 percent of its rainforests.
• Then we have water, soil, air pollution not to mention water shortages in much of the world. Eight hundred million people — 1 in 10 — do not have access to clean water.
• More than a million animals and plants are threatened with extinction, according to scientific studies.
• Plastics are suffocating us. In 1950, we manufactured two million tons of plastic. We are approaching the manufacture of 500 million tons -- that’s 500
million tons. Microplastics have been found in human brains and blood. We are a Great Lakes state and 22 million tons of plastic are dumped in these lakes
annually. Seventeen billion pounds go into the oceans each year.
• We cannot, it’s impossible, to cleanup our oceans, lakes, streams and other waterways. One scientist, testing a new submarine, found plastic trash bags at 36,000 feet below the surface, the deepest anyone has ever gone.
If you drive an SUV, consider it contains about 400 pounds of plastic.
• We are experiencing rage fires and wind storms around the world, the likes of which we have never seen before.
And, I might stress, these are just a few highlights — more accurately, lowlights.
(Incidentally, we are polluting space as well. NASA itself has stated that there are 6,000 tons of materials in Low Earth Orbit, making it the “world’s largest garbage dump.” The International Space Station has had to initiate evasive maneuvers on many occasions to avoid crashing into this “junk.”)
Anyone who believes we can solve all the problems makes Pollyanna look like a pessimist.
It is not in the cards. The political will does not exist to tackle these issues nor do the economics.
There have been 30 annual international environmental summits called the Conference of Partners (COP) since 1995 and each year the environmental situation was worse than the previous meeting.
Lots of passionate speeches, promises and pledges. Never any follow up.
In 1994, Carl Edward Sagan, astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, and science communicator, wrote a book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” (Random House). In it, he included a photo of the Earth taken, in 1990, from some 3.75 billion miles from Earth by the space probe, Voyager 1. The Earth appears the size of a pinhead. Sagan concludes his description of the photo with the following:
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Sadly, Sagan’s hope and wish have fallen on deaf ears.
In his essay, he also observed: “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
How right he was. There is a word for doing it to ourselves: Suicide.
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