The water is becoming dangerously acidic due to heat trapping gases, changing its chemistry and life-sustaining properties. The water is getting excessively hot due to heat-trapping gases that astronauts have added to the craft’s atmosphere.And imagine that it dawned on them that they were responsible. Imagine how astronauts on a deep space voyage in a craft that mimics Earth’s planetary system would panic if they learned the following about the water system of their spacecraft, a system designed to do all the things listed above. Our rainwater, drinking water, weather, climate, coastlines, much of our food, and even the oxygen in the air we breathe, are all ultimately provided and regulated by the sea.” Spaceship Earth’s ultimate life support system, the place where life began, is the blue in Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, the ocean, the subject of SDG 14: Life Below Water.įrom the SDG 14 webpage: “The ocean drives global systems that make the Earth habitable for humankind. Humans are causing what is being called the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth.įor these reasons, and because of the vast injustice in terms of the distribution of resources and burdens of pollution between the haves and the have nots, the international Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were established in 2015 by 193 nations to help us live within the Earth’s means and ensure a fair distribution of resources among all people. In fact, thanks to human behavior things have already ended badly for a lot of species that humans have driven to extinction. Keep this up and this whole thing is going to end badly for Homo sapiens and a lot of other species. We are behaving as a species – particularly those of us in the industrialized world – like inattentive and irresponsible astronauts who are shockingly cavalier about the life generating and life supporting systems of our spacecraft. Yet we humans treat this pale blue dot as if it is boundless and impregnable, an infinite source of resources and an infinite sink for our wastes. On a cosmic scale, our planet is as insignificant and limited as the ISS, albeit teeming with beauty and life. But it also at the same time looks extremely fragile.” It looks like a living, breathing organism. Space shuttle astronaut Ron Garan explains: “When we look down at the Earth from space we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. Even from low Earth orbit the lesson is clear. They were also inspired and humbled by its stunning beauty and preciousness. It was painfully obvious just how small, lonely, and unprotected Earth is. All 24 Apollo astronauts who went to the moon were sobered by a similar view. This rarely seen Earth image was taken from the moon lunar orbiter Clementine in 1994, a similar view observed by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s. While it’s bigger and appears almost infinitely vast from our perspective on the ground, from a little higher perspective it is obvious just how small, fragile, and vulnerable it is in the life-threatening harshness of its surroundings, and just how finite are its life support systems. That’s why Buckminster Fuller coined the term Spaceship Earth for his 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. If we think about it, the Earth is no different. The ISS is so small, its resources so meager, its surroundings so hostile. No astronaut would ever take these systems for granted in the harshness of space.
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