May 28, 2007
Why Would Outer Space
Want Our Inner Junk?
It’s bad enough that endless debris turns highways into hazard-filled,
high-speed obstacle courses. Now we must beware of space junk falling on
our heads.
A
larger-than-golf-ball-size object that crashed through the roof of a New
Jersey home earlier this year isn’t a meteorite after all. It is made
from an aluminum alloy that doesn’t occur naturally, according to the
American Natural History Museum in New York. It’s now thought to be
“orbital debris,” meaning part of a discarded satellite, rocket or some
other spacecraft.
Wonderful. Not content to foul up our own planet, we human beings have
spent the last five-plus decades of the “space age” littering our solar
system and beyond with our discards, too.
Space exploration proponents have long argued that venturing outward
will be the ultimate way to save humankind. Pardon the skepticism, but
if we cannot live in harmony with each other here on Earth, and in
harmony with the Earth itself, what makes us believe we can do so
anywhere else?
This mirage of making a new start in a different physical location is
also known as the “geographic solution.” English adventurers seeking a
fresh start in a new location established what became Jamestown, Va.,
which just celebrated the 400th anniversary of its founding.
Alas, they brought their religious and racial prejudices with them,
causing strife and untold misery and death for themselves and the native
population.
Now that we have discovered what appears to be the first habitable
planet outside our solar system, there will be an even greater push for
space exploration. It’s inevitable, given human curiosity and drive to
see what’s on the other side of the hill, the continent or the solar
system. We will explore space, even if it takes trillions of dollars,
countless lives and the real-life equivalent of the “warp drive” to
conquer vast distances within our lifetimes.
Even so, it would not be at all surprising if, somewhere in our space
sojourns, we meet the alien equivalent of the trash patrol. And, just
like the character Klaatu in the film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,”
these beings will warn us that if we don’t change our messy ways, they
will take pre-emptive action to annihilate us for behaving like
intergalactic pests.
We
may or may not find a place to survive in outer space. More likely we
will spend all that money, time, effort and energy only to discover that
even the ultimate in geographic solutions doesn’t work. No matter how
far we go—across town, across the country, across the world or across
the galaxy – we cannot escape the problems that bedevil us right here on
earth. In other words, we can – and do – take it with us, unless we
pause to remove it from within us before departing.
All that space junk, all that litter, all that pollution we see around
us is a reflection with a message, if only we have the wisdom to pay
heed to it and then the courage to act. If our Earth and even the skies
around us are filled with junk and pollutants, it’s because our own
hearts are brimming over with a noxious substance as well –
self-judgment.
We
judge ourselves, and because the pain of such self-judgment is so great,
we turn it outward and judge others. We judge them because they don’t
speak like we do, believe like we do, adhere to our specific codes of
conduct . . . whatever. We judge them for being tree-huggers, for not
being tree-huggers, for killing, for not killing, for being capitalists
or not being capitalists, for owning guns, for not owning guns. The list
is endless.
When and where does it all stop? Only when we examine our hearts and
give up at least one self-judgment. It’s an invisible but momentous
decision that eliminates one small source of inner pollution.
The more we clear out our hearts, the cleaner our world will be. It’s
the self-affirming opposite of the self-destructive cycle we are in at
present. With cleaner hearts and the resulting cleaner surroundings, who
knows? We might even be welcomed then in other parts of the universe.
© 2007
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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