By Mickey Friedman
December 23, 2014
Some of us have decided to get the heck out of Dodge. And, as usual, the desire to flee is being sold as noble.
So there’s talk of Mars.
Elon Musk, who I’ve never met, has brought us the Tesla and SpaceX, his own private space program. He seems a fine fellow but Elon is only the most prominent of earthlings who wants Mars.
Because “an asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us … Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct.”
Perhaps he’s noticed that the Earth is increasingly over-valued. Our oceans filled with plastic crap; our icebergs melting; butterflies and bees and polar bears dying like flies.
So it’s time for a favored few – I’m assuming the seats won’t be cheap – to buckle up. And fly on out.
So you’ll hear more about the glorious need to become an interplanetary species. Because, really, is one planet ever enough?
I for one am hoping there really are Guardians of the Galaxy. And that they step in. And stop us. Really soon. Before the Musk Enterprise lifts off.
Because I don’t think ruining one planet gives you the right to ruin another.
We here in the Best Country in the World talk a lot about American Exceptionalism. But it’s really just a subset of Human Exceptionalism. A particularly devious disease. Human Exceptionalism has enabled us to avert our eyes and close our minds to the ever precipitous death of species after species who have previously shared this space with us.
According to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund, the numbers of a representative group of vertebrates – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish – have declined by more than 50% in just forty years. Forty years.
Numbers and statistics are boring. So how about we imagine a pissed off, testosterone-filled young suburbanite storming Noah’s Ark with his dad’s Uzi and opening fire. A minus one by one. A dead gazelle here. A bloody tiger there. And that black rhino in the corner.
According to Christine Dell’Amore of National Geographic: “Freshwater animals, like frogs, show the biggest drops in the index, with an average decline of 79 percent. Populations of land-dwellers like the African elephant have plummeted by 30 percent.
“Marine species declined 39 percent, with the biggest losses in the tropics and the oceans off Antarctica—especially among marine turtles, many shark species, and large migratory seabirds such as the wandering albatross.”
Mars fanciers know space is at a premium. And it’s a long way to the red planet. Do you really want to sit next to a migratory seabird who’s pissed to be in coach not first class?
People, people, people. So enough with the animals. Earthlings one and all.
But if you were on the red planet, would you want us?
I mean look at how we treat each other. We men especially. Men, men, men.
Why do I say this? How about this? 42,000 women were interviewed throughout Europe. And according to the 2014 European Union Report on Violence to Women: “What emerges is a picture of extensive abuse that affects many women’s lives, but is systematically under-reported to the authorities. For example, one in 10 women has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 15, and one in 20 has been raped. Just over one in five women has experienced physical and/or sexual violence from either a current or previous partner, and just over one in 10 women indicates that they have experienced some form of sexual violence by an adult before they were 15 years old. Yet, as an illustration, only 14 % of women reported their most serious incident of intimate partner violence to the police, and 13 % reported their most serious incident of non-partner violence to the police.”
We’re talking the civilized streets of Europe, not the dirt roads of Afghanistan.
But what of we Americans? Whoops, in the United States, according to the CDC: “An estimated 19.3 percent of women and 1.7 percent of men have been raped during their lifetimes … An estimated 43.9 percent of women and 23.4 percent of men experienced other forms of sexual violence during their lifetimes, including being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences … ”
According to FBI statistics about murders in 2010, “Of the offenders for whom gender was known, 90.3 percent were males.”
And have we ever learned to share? According to the Federal Reserve, “The top 3 percent of families saw their share of total income rise to 30.5% in 2013 from 27.7% in 2010, while the bottom 90 percent saw their share fall.”
We don’t deserve Mars. Mars for the Martians.
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NOTES
Elon Musk, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
2014 Living Planet Report
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/
“Has Half of World’s Wildlife Been Lost in Past 40 Years?”
Christine Dell’Amore
National Geographic News
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/1409030-animals-wildlife-wwf-decline-science-world/
Violence against women: an EU-wide survey
http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra-2014-vaw-survey-main-results_en.pdf
Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner
Violence Victimization — National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,
United States, 2011
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm
Federal Reserve
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-gap-between-rich-poor-americans-widened-during-recovery-1409853628