Earth isn’t good enough - Ernie Stanley

Earth isn’t good enough.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2443203420070425

This article, released today, reports on the discovery of a long distant planet orbiting Gliese 581. Normally I’d be bored with anything remotely resembling the type of complicated astronomy deals with, however this article caught my attention. Gliese 581 itself is a Red Dwarf star (whatever that means) and is of relative unimportance. However, the planet just discovered orbiting it is. Today it was announced that scientists have found the most Earth-like planet yet. It’s not called anything, but the planet has excited its discoverers.

And so I ask why? Why does this impossible to reach planet interest science? Is the current paradigm of scientific thought so implanted in pure knowledge that it skips so many steps in the name of experiment? Perhaps I’m just worldly, but it at first seems ethically erroneous to search for a planet to sustain life while ours is devoured by the human species. Yes this planet has water, and yes it has atmosphere, but would this knowledge be so important to us if we weren’t so addicted to consumption? We contaminate our water supplies so readily, destroy our atmosphere so easily. But we’re not oblivious of our destructive of waste and destruction. Debates rage and fade and then rage again (see Global Warming) which surround our corruption of this planet, and yet we have the mindset that what we do with the planet is either unalterable or irrelevant. It seems quite atrocious that nations and big business are unwilling to reduce dangerous emissions but will spend BILLIONS on finding an irrelevant planet. And oddly there are no ethical debates on our pursuits of extraterrestrial discovery.

While it is my belief that our curiosity has led to our supreme development as life forms, I question heavily this activity that leads us to spend so much energy, so much time, and so much manpower (money is always essentially irrelevant and only symbolic of these three) on something so distant and unreachable while our home becomes uninhabitable. I haven’t researched this paradigm in depth yet, but I would not be surprised to find that such exploration of the distant distracts us from our current home and in fact accelerates our corruption of it. Perhaps it is time to stop ignoring what’s right under our nose in our delusions of grandeur in the search for the solution to the largest world dilemma.