Reaching Our Final Frontier
Aspiration lifts us into space — yet not far enough, and not enough of us to save us from our arrogance. Have we created our own final frontier by steering our planet into a climatic abyss?
I’ve been told that the universe is infinite. Our little mudball of a planet is merely a tiny speck in this vast dark nothingness. I’ve heard astronauts describe two sides of the same medal when they gaze at Earth from the round viewport of their module atop a rocket speeding away from all that is familiar to them. The first feeling they cite is one of humbleness. Our spherical home is small and seems insignificant against the engulfing black backdrop of space. Humans and other animals are not visible with the naked eye, only emphasizing our insignificance. The flip side that almost every astronaut without exception expresses is the insurmountable awareness that this one small planet is all we have, and we better take good care of it. These combined feelings are so common amongst astronauts that they have received a name from psychologists — the Overview Effect.
This summer I visited a museum that tried to emulate the Overview Effect in a room with large screens that displayed videos taken from the hexagonal viewport of the International Space Station. Though I was not entirely caught by the feeling in that room — trying to preserve my personal space by social distancing from visitors apparently not so keen on wiping out a deadly virus — I did find an unnerving feeling creeping up on me when watching the images on the walls outside this dark room. Plastic pollution was portrayed in all its grisly forms, from birds’ eye view pictures of the plastic soups floating around in every ocean of our planet to haunting images of sea animals caught in plastic entrapments some human carelessly dumped into the water — sometimes thousands of miles from where it eventually cost a life. Even though this exhibition dated back to 2015 it had not diminished in strength nor significance. On the contrary, we now know from the recent Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that things have gotten worse rather than better since then.
As the billionaires reach for the heavens with their personal pet-projects — or should I say, petty projects — the scientists around the world agree that we are on the brink of reaching a point of no return. Each and every time a new scientific report about climate change comes out it tells us that the situation is grimmer than expected. All timelines need to be adjusted! Again. We’re reaching the one point five degrees threshold in 2100 — uh, 2070, uh 2050, 2030, aw, forget it. Leaving the numbers and statistics to the experts, my best guess is that we are already way beyond the notorious tipping point, but the scientists are too afraid to admit it — either to us or to themselves.
In a sense, the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a week’s time is sort of the climate change run at fast forward mode. At first, the authorities said no such thing would happen. Then they changed their tune and said it would take a while. And then everyone was surprised by the enormous and overwhelming speed at which things evolved. Now the world is left to pick up the pieces, and the Afghans pay the heaviest price. There is no outside world to pick up any pieces when it comes to the climate of our one and only planet. We — and many species with us — will pay the heaviest price.
Is there no light at the end of the tunnel then? Why so gloomy? If we’re already beyond saving, what’s the point? It seems the scientists want to prevent us from fearing there is no rescue mission so that we keep our hope and act accordingly. Even in the beforementioned IPCC report there is a hint of optimism. We’re not too late, they say. If we act now we can still save the planet, and with it, ourselves. The biggest problem with this positive note is that most people will stop reading right there. What comes next is a warning from the scientists that the saving of our planet can only be accomplished with draconian measures — life-altering changes for us all. But alas, most minds will already have scrolled to lighter topics, comfortably resting in the notion that others will do the saving for them.
Einstein famously said the universe and human stupidity are infinite, but that he was not so sure about the universe. Observing the climate crisis, I wonder if it’s human stupidity we need to worry about or rather human arrogance. We have the facts — all of us experience climate change nowadays, and all scientists bar a few insignificant edge cases agree on human causation. Economic gains trump existential safeguards for most of the leadership around the globe, still. I propend this myopic paradigm exists because of human arrogance. In lieu of a shared sense of fear and ultimate responsibility for humankind and other species, many of us knowingly turn a deaf ear to the overwhelming number of alarm bells that are ringing. Most still choose the same type of leaders, most still evade the draconian measures, most still keep their fingers crossed, hoping — against all odds — that everything is going to be A-okay after all.
I suggest not to be optimistic about our future and thereby quell the urge to act. Let us be realistic and cling frantically to the last straws we can grab to prevent ourselves from arrogantly reaching our final frontier — not out there, but right here, in the only space we can live in.
Patrick Heller.
