Gazing on planet Earth

If we are not really that sure what is going on with our planet right now – that is not surprising! Just looking at the earth from a distance, even in a satelite photograph is an awesome experience. Add to that the sense that in an unknown galaxy – even on the moon – there are unknown possibilities… and you have fertile ground for a new generation of sci-fi movies about saving the planet from global warming.

Perhaps the middle of the GFC is not the right time to be thinking about space exploration and solutions to a crowded resource poor planet. But perhaps it is the right time to be doing some of the thinking about other planets if not the going. The atmosphere of Mars it is said to be 95.32% carbon dioxide. Yet, sometime in its past it is believed that Mars did support life – fishes, reptiles, birds, small water snakes, microbes etc (even if they were 1/3 the size of ours here on Earth.)

Clearly life on Mars did not die out because of anthropogenic global warming….so what went wrong?


3 thoughts on “Gazing on planet Earth

  1. Tom Turner

    The Buddha, Christ and Confucius probably died without knowing that each other’s countries existed, poor things. And all readers of this blog post are likely to die without knowing whether we are alone in the universe, poor things. But IF the people now living could find some way of diverting money from bankers’ bailouts to astronomers then the youngest of us might discover how important, or unimportant, we are. Instead of building that stupid International Space Station they should have built an International Space Observatory on the moon, or somewhere.
    Some further thoughts:
    1) all species become extinct
    2) our planet will end in ‘ice or fire’
    3) so sustainability is only a very minor holding operation

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