REM@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU (Robert Elton Maas) (02/12/86)
E> Date: Fri, 7 Feb 86 13:37:53 pst E> From: <ames!eugene@RIACS.ARPA> E> We must be the meek and at the same time we are travelling thru the E> stars. If we cannot take care of our home, our spaceship thru E> the stars, it's not clear to me that we can take care of any spaceship. We *are* taking care of our Earth more or less. We aren't perfect, but we haven't yet totally destroyed it, and we are working on limiting damage to Earth despite our population increasing to such an extent that we soon will be the single species with more biomass than any other. We are trying to avoid creating an ecological disaster comparable to what the first oxygen-emitting photosynthetic bacteria created a few billion years ago. -- But some insist that we be perfect, that we totally cease adversely affecting the environment, before we leave home to develop resources in space to augment our feeble resources (energy and minerals) on Earth. By that argument, since in my one-room apartment I am unable yet to clean some stains I've somehow created in the kitchen I should never leave the apartment to go to work or to buy groceries at the supermarket, I should instead sit in my apartment working hard on cleaning up those stains with the means at my disposal within my apartment, starving to death because I haven't proven I can take absolutely-perfect care of my apartment thus have no right to go out and pollute the rest of the world. If I adopted that policy I'd die of starvation within a short portion of my nomal lifespan (measured in weeks) due to running out of food. Likewise if the human race stays on Earth it'll go extinct within a short portion of its normal evolutionary span (measured in tens of years) due to running out of energy and room to live causing desperate people to try harder to kill each other so they themselves can live, using chemical/biological warfare and thermonuclear explosives.