So Harvey said to me, “Today is Earth Day. You should write something about the earth!”
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To which I responded, “First off, I, like my readers, am not sure you’re actually a physically separate person from me, so it’s perhaps pointless to talk to you. Secondly and more importantly, I’m not quite sure the earth is great.”
Let’s look at things objectively: The only reason people think the earth is so great is that we have no other habitable planets to compare it to. If we didn’t need the environment to survive, we probably wouldn’t spend much time trying to preserve it.
Isn’t celebrating Earth Day pretty much celebrating our slavery to the fickle nature of the environment? Why would we want to celebrate that? Wouldn’t a “Free from Earth Day” be better where we one day celebrate how we used technology to overcome our dependence on the environment?
The planet closest to Earth is Venus. It’s about the same size as Earth and probably very lovely (the sun rises in the west!). Yet, all the plans for our first interplanetary trip involve the much further away and smaller Mars. Why? Because we envision that one day we can make an environment there much like like that of Earth’s. Do you see how this dependence on an environment has limited our thinking?
If we were more optimistic, any time we heard our actions could lead to a natural disaster, we would say, “So what? We’re humans! We’re innovative! We can survive anything!” That’s the attitude that gets things done.
I live on the earth because I have to. I don’t particularly care for it and anyone who says otherwise is only fooling himself.