Thoughts expressed in a post on facebook.

The following is from a U/I friend of mine on facebook, UI because I mean to protect his privacy. What follows are my thoughts on the matter expressed in the first post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75JDqWzkN9U&t=3s
If every person on our blue Earth watched this video, the world would be a much better place. At least for a few minutes. Listen closely to Carl Sagan's words till the end. It won't fail to get you teary.-JD

Brings out another topic: This morning, I heard reactions from some of our astronauts to Pres. Obama's plan for NASA. I won't bother going into any detail, but I started wondering just where we'd go if we could leave this planet.

Venus is out. Battery acid rain and 900 degrees plus temperatures in an atmosphere that has as much pressure as the ocean at the bottom of the Mariana trench just isn't conducive to our form of life.

Mars isn't much better. Atmosphere too thin for a deep breath, and no water, and no food, unless you are a big red rock eater. (What's big and red and eats rocks? A big red rock eater!) How much fun this planet would have been if it were like Ray Bradbury's descriptions in The Martian Chronicles. Instead, it is a cold, dead planet. It's core is not molten, it's plate tectonics are stopped, ergo the lack of a magnetic field such as the one that surrounds the Earth and shields us from deadly cosmic radiation. Mars has no such protection. Life for us here is impossible. Planet can't be terraformed, either.

No, it looks like this is it. This planet is our home, such as it is, and it is all we are likely to ever see. No other planet in this solar system is habitable. And the closest star from our own, the sun, is Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.2 light years away. BTW, that distance translates to the distance light will have traveled in 4.2 years, and light's speed is a blazing 186,000 miles in a single second. And there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, times 4.2 would give you 132,451,200 seconds, and multiply that by 186,000 is 24,635,923,200 miles. Yes, that's over 24 and one half BILLION miles. That, as Bugs once said, ain't just around the corner.

Now I know we all have our pet theories as to how the planet was formed and what its ultimate demise will be, but we should all realize that until that fate is realized, we gotta call this wonderfully small, but indescribably complex world home. That means that we have to accept that the world was here before we got here, and it may have to, and should be able to sustain life for many, many years to come. But only if we begin to accept that nothing on this planet was put here so that a mere handful of its denizens can enrich themselves at the expense of both the planet and the majority of the life forms that inhabit it. Otherwise, we may find out what happens when one of those mass extinctions hits the earth, as we and most of the other life forms are killed off, largely by our own hand.