UrgentCareEarth.com
Chapter V
Our Place
On the earth, Among the Stars, As the only known humans,
As custodians of the earth, As custodians of each other,
As discoverers of the beginning of space and time.
I have been interested in astronomy since my early teens and that interest has continued as new discoveries were made. And then the newest discoveries threw much of earlier work into question, not for knowing what has happened so far but in the predictions for the long distant future. But at this point I am most interested were we fit in, for by any measure it is the greatest question of all. We know a great deal, especiall about how our universe evolved and how we evolved. But we certqinly do not know all the ansers and, to spill the beans, neither does anyone else, which I will explain
In a sense we are everything there is in the universe. We occupy many places, perhaps even all places. We are the only creatures we know of who are aware of the universe. We occupy the only planet we know of with sentient life. We are very special and possibly unique.
The same could be said for the beautiful planet we have been given and the same could be said of our minds and senses, extraordinary in every way. We see and hear and are aware of all things around us. Beautiful things, ordinary things and horrible things. We think beautifully, we think ordinary thoughts and we think horrible thoughts.
There are also things we don't think about, or we don't think about often enough or possibly even notice. Most of us don't think of our place in the universe or even know much we have found out much about it. Most of us don't think of our extraordinary blue marble or especially what we have done to it, what we are doing to it, what we should be doing to it. It's future, no matter how special it is is very precarious. And most of us are not even aware of this, let alone think about what to do about it.
If there is a creator we are about to commit the greatest sin against the creator in the history of the earth. Below is a representation of the monumental steps it took to create the earth.
The steps from the Grand Singularity (big bang} in the order in which they happened.
The entire "time-line" took 13.7 billion years.
A small portion of the visible universe in which galaxies like ours are found.
Our place is among the stars in the Milky Way, in the outer arms
of a spiral galaxy much like this one.
The place where we live photographed as we were traveling to our moon.
Blue is cool as was our place before we become industrious
and we realized what that would do.
The temperature of our place after about 150 years
of being industrious. We were well into the process of ravaging it but did not recognize the danger this caused.
Not paying attention, not studying, keeping our eyes on our money,
and many other offences, can raise havoc with our place:
extreme droughts, fires and floods among hundreds of others. We have now reached the place where only drastic measures may save our place.