EXOPLANETS DANGEROUS DISTRACTIONS?

NASA has just revealed a treasure trove of new exoplanets (planets outside of our own solar system) located in orbit around a dwarf star designated "Trappist -1" located some 40 light years away (229 trillion miles away). Several of the (seven) new planets are described as being "earth like" and "habitable". The danger of contemplating these "other worlds" is that their mere existence threatens to act as a distraction from the desperate need of humanity to focus on HEALING OUR OWN PLANET----the only home for humanity and one which will remain "our only place" for the foreseeable future. Any hope of "colonizing" these distant places is absolutely and incontrovertibly impossible even with the most optimistic projections for breakthroughs in advanced technology. Even though NASA estimates that it would take 800,000 years (!) to reach Trappist-! using our most advanced rocket propulsion systems. The mere contemplation of space travel and colonization of other worlds is a dangerous mental exercise because it has the unintended tendency to encourage the disastrous "waste it and leave it" trait which, sadly, appears to be hard-wired into the mentality of human kind.

The Earth, our only home, is presently in a parlous state. Our atmosphere is polluted with human-generated gases that trap earth heat..and raise the over-all earth temperature. This rise in temperature will drastically alter the habitability of our planet. Our world oceans are polluted with human and industrial derived wastes. We have exterminated countless species to extinction and destroyed native flora and fauna over vast swaths of our beautiful blue planet. We know we are despoiling "our own back yard" and making it unlivable, but we seem incapable of making the necessary changes to our life styles and our economies to alter the inevitable outcome--no air fit to breath, no water fit to drink and no food fit to eat.

Our evolutionary past has produced not the species of primate physical anthropologists have designated: Homo sapiens ("man daring to be wise") but perhaps a better name would be: Homo adnihilo ( "man the destroyer"). An upright ape-species wonderfully able to manipulate its habitat with its hands, enabling it to make tools, to kill, to exploit, to destroy and to devastate. This now-dominant primate species also evolved a brain capable of understanding and contemplating itself and its surroundings, but even so it remains unable to control those manipulative and dangerous hands. The result of its mere 200,000 year dominance has taken our planet to the cusp of drastic ecological collapse. Only determined and intelligent human intervention can save our planet.

NASA has now provided us with knowledge of "new worlds" orbiting around Trappist-1 and a tantalizing new image. Will this image be simply seen by the dominant primate as more "novae terrae" to exploit, to conquer and destroy? Will that image distract our collective mechanistic human brains from the existential threat before us----to somehow HEAL THE EARTH we inhabit? For our days here on the "blue planet" are numbered and any imagined escape-passage to new worlds is and will remain impossible.

NOTES

LIGHT YEAR: The distance a beam of light would travel in one year at 186,000 miles per second.

DISTANCE TO TRAPPIST-1: 229 trillion miles.

COMMENT

A planet 40 light years away....is very far away indeed (229 trillion miles or 369 trillion km away). The Trappist -1 planets are just barely visible with the most powerful space telescopes, but impossible to get there even with the most optimistic view of advances in technology. Our fastest spacecraft ever launched--New Horizons-- that is the one which recently flew past Pluto in 2015 at more than 14 km /second or 32,000 miles per hour. New Horizons would take more than 800,000 years to make it to Trappist -1. Consider that humans (as Homo sapiens) have existed on Earth for a mere 200,000 years, thus the time it would take to go to Trappist-1 would be four times the length of time that humans have existed on earth. That is if we could overcome the problem of the crew's food supply (for 500,000 generations), micrometeorite impacts, and powerful cancer risks of cosmic radiation to the crew. But even with the vastly optimistic supposition of a breakthrough in technology which would permit spacecraft to approximate speeds approaching the speed of light there are vast technical problems which would inhibit any attempts. One of the most significant is the tiny concentrations of hydrogen atoms found in the near-void of space. There are only one or two per cubic meter. But during travel which approached the speed of light these seemingly insignificant gases would become a bombardment of intense radiation which would penetrate the space ship, and as it continued it would heat any conceivable material that it is made of to melting point with the heat of friction. According to Arthur and William Edelstein (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) in a 2012 a paper exploring the effects of cosmic hydrogen radiation on hypersonic or hypolightspeed space travel. The Edelsteins estimated that at 95% of speed of light friction with gas molecules in space would heat a space ship (of any conceivable material) to melting point.. See: BBC "How fast could humans travel through space?", by Adam Hadhazy, 10 August 2015 (downloaded 2-23-17)