Knock on Wood

 

 

Have you ever said something sarcastically, only to wake in the night and regret it?

I don’t mean to overestimate the readership of this blog, but I can’t help but feel guilty somehow to sign onto Yahoo.com this week to the Featured cover-story splashed across the front page:

 

“Find out how scientists plan to colonize the moon and Mars!”

 

I can’t help myself - I need to take another moment to expound on the fundamental stupidity of this endeavour. There is no doubt in my mind that the renewed urgency with which we’re discussing the colonization of space is tied to an acknowledgment of the global climatological crisis in which we have placed ourselves. This means we’re faced with one of two options, as my mother liked to say:

 

1) Shape up

 

or

 

2) Ship out

 

This choice was offered facetiously; certainly one would not choose to leave home and the comforts provided therein. It’d be a pretty poor survival strategy, and yet our public discourse about the climate and population crises focus not on conservation of the planet we have, but where we can get another one just like it.

 

This brazen refusal to consider altering our lifestyles, even a bit, is one of the things that confounds me most about our culture - it is so petulant and infantile as to call into crisis any claim to wisdom by our society. The West is stumbling perilously through its adolescence, enamored by a wide-range of new privileges and opportunities, blustering blindly forward in willful ignorance of those that came before - indeed- of the entirety of previous human experience.

 

Weve forsaken that wisdom and are paying the price, but like any proud teenager, we won’t be swayed by authority; we insist on making our own mistakes, and finding out for ourselves, but it would help to have someone sober behind the wheel.

Tagged as: climate change, mars, science, space