Skip to main content

Future This -- Writer's Poke #340



“Is it the end of the world, Daddy?”

My daughter, Tavi, is 4, and she has been asking me a lot lately about the end of the world. I’m not sure where she picked up this question, but she’s my little gothic girl, and she’s quite interested in death.

“When we’re dead, we’re skeletons. Right?”

Death isn’t something she fears, and she’s certainly too young to fully comprehend what death is, but it’s a topic that she’s clearly working on.

Last week, she started talking to me about Mars. I’m glad that she’s interested in space, but the link back to death and the end of the world was still on her mind.

“Daddy,” she said, “when we need a fresh new planet, let’s go to Mars. We can kill all the aliens and make it our home.”

I used this conversation as a “teachable moment,” explaining to her that most aliens are probably friendly, and if any live on Mars, we would need to be gracious guests, and gracious guests don’t commit genocide. It just isn’t the neighborly thing to do.

Life is fragile and uncertain. Even a four-year-old can pick up on that. Tavi knows the “Goldilocks” story by heart, but soon I plan to teach her about the scientific idea of the “habitable zone,” which is sometimes called the “Goldilocks Zone.” The universe most likely has billions of planets, but how many of them are situated at just the right distance from their suns to sustain intelligent life? In our own solar system, for example, the Earth is perfectly placed, and it is the only planet that is situated at just the right distance to sustain life. Mars, actually, is a little bit too far away. Human beings may use it as a place to camp some day, but I doubt that we’ll ever live there – at least not the way that we live on Earth. Mars will never be a place to call home.

Even life on Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist without our moon. The size and the distance of our moon are basically “perfect.” We have a relatively big moon, and its gravitation pull helps to control the tides. Moreover, it just might have something to do with the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the rate of the Earth’s rotation.

The conditions for life on Earth seem natural to us, and most of us probably don’t give them a single thought on a regular basis, and perhaps that’s part of the problem. We shouldn’t assume that life exists on purpose; nor should we assume that life exists no matter how we choose to act or live. If we have the power to affect the Earth’s mean temperature by just a few degrees, we can change our planet from Earth to hell, and from what I’m told, going to hell is a non-refundable, one-way ticket.

What do you view as the greatest threat to human life on Earth? What can you do to help ensure that society works together collectively to address this issue?

“Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.” – William Dyer

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Digging for the Truth" Experiment #1 - Real Coffee with Scott Adams

I've been curious about how others perceive reality. What is "true" and "real" to me is not necessarily "true" and "real" to others.  First stop: Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert.  He's currently 67, does a daily podcast called "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" which draws about 30,000 listeners on YouTube, with 172,000 total subscribers to the channel. Podcast is also available on all the usual places, with a 4.4 rating on Apple Podcasts. Each episode is about an hour long, or a little less.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15SFbr2vj8c 1. Basic format: Just runs through news articles that drew his interest. On the April 15 episode (link above), he ran through 28 articles. Often he'd laugh at something, sometimes to show his disbelief.  2. Adams is not a big fan of science. He's open to conspiracy theories. Believes that the government doesn't tell us the truth (although he seems to think the Trump administration is an e...

"Digging for the Truth" Experiment #2 -- Bald and Bankrupt

His first name is Benjamin, but he usually goes by "Bald." Bald has been posting travel videos since 2018. His passion is anything Soviet Union, but he will take the time to learn a language before he visits a place -- not only Russian, but Spanish, say. It's important for him to have the ability to speak to people in their native tongue.  On Friday, April 18, Bald posted a video called "Solo on Ukraine's Eastern Front." So far it's generated 2.7 million views, and based on viewer average, it will likely go over 5 million views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3HRnwC6pso Most of his videos are in the neighborhood of an hour in length. In them, he usually establishes where he is and what his goal for being there is. He will start somewhere and then go seek out a place, without knowing exactly what he will find there.  For the latest Ukraine video, he starts at the Kiev train station. It's been 3 years, he says, since he last visited Ukraine, and he h...

The Unconventional Life

How conventional is your life? If you're in your 30s as I am, think about how much you and I have in common: Spouce? check Kid(s)? check Job? check House? check Debt? check Obviously there's nothing wrong with conventional living, but if that's all there is, it seems kind of robotic to me. We have our freewill, and yet we all go through similar life stages, and we all share basic common experiences. What makes my life any different, then, from a million other lives in the Western world? This bothers me, and I yearn to make my life more unconventional. Of course people that are "unconventional" often find themselves being unconventional in uniform ways. So, perhaps there's no way out of the box. There's no way to live a life that someone else hasn't already lived. And maybe that's okay. I would just like to be able to add some unconventional elements to the satisfactory conventional elements of my life. The question is: How can I do that w...