This is our planet seen from the Moon. What a photograph for Earth Day 2018. Will human eyes experience this in person from the Moon someday? Only time and our collective caring for Earth and therefore ourselves will decide.
| Earth From Lunar Orbit Credit: NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter |
If there is just one thing you remember from Earth Day, let it be this: "The Earth doesn't need us, we need the Earth".
We humans are so wrapped up in our own lives and timelines that we forget the Earth is 4.6 BILLION years old and has another couple billion years to go. The dying Sun will vaporize the planet and eventually return all that it was back to the Milky Way Galaxy. Every atom that ever existed on the planet will return to from whence it came perhaps to form a new planet and life elsewhere.
We are not immortal, nothing is. But we are in very grave danger of altering the planet's climate due to overpopulation, pollution, and lack of total worldwide political commitment to the issue - especially from the current Administration in the U.S. I have always said, "Change the planet's climate or its geology and you change humanity." We are at that point now with regard to climate change - see for your self at https://climate.nasa.gov.
We can destroy ourselves quite easily through any number of unleashed human causes or be wiped out by a comet impact. But there is comfort for me in knowing this, the Earth will survive regardless. The history of the Earth has seen several mass extinctions, the last being the dinosaurs 65 million years ago most likely due to an impact event in the Gulf of Mexico. The dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions of years.....we just stood upright on the plains of Africa 2.5 million years ago and civilization is only 30,000 years old.
The dinosaurs are dead because they didn't have telescopes and a space program to save themselves. What will be the epitaph for humanity? Will we destroy ourselves while temporarily altering the Earth?
Make no mistake about it this Earth Day 2018........we are now at the decision point that will determine the fate of humanity. We must act in Earth's favor which ultimately means in our own. Governments must be compelled by their people to be Earth (and human) friendly. Humanity must change the current worldwide status quo to renewable energy, less pollution and environmentally sound decisions.
We live on a very special planet that is currently home to the only known life in all of the observable Universe. What will be our future? Our legacy? Will we survive and thrive or fail to extinction?
The choice is ours.
Sky Guy in VA
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