Source

"Having orbited the Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Humans, let us preserve and increase the beauty, not destroy it!"

― Yuri Gagarin

Every few months, someone with more money and fame than knowledge spouts off a Grand Plan to leave Earth for somewhere else to escape our problems. And everyone who has dealt with the complexity of dynamic systems heaves an enormous sigh.

We can’t even create a stable sealed biome on Earth, where we’re operating within the geomagnetic field at standard temperature & pressure.

It’s the simplest version of a faked environment, yet we repeatedly fail. We don’t even bother pretending the space station is independent.

How exactly do we expect to successfully terraform another world to be Earthling-friendly when we’ve made our planet less hospitable?

We didn’t maintain Earth’s climate & we’re failing to correct back despite it getting noticeably less pleasant. We’re un-terraforming Terra.

If your dream is humans scattered across the planets & that’s what inspires you: Cool. Great. Love it, and you can push that dream forward with sustainability on Earth. Space requires intense reduce/reuse/recycle & green tech. Help us pass on Easy Mode so we can up the challenge.

In space, yesterday’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee. If we don’t have that level of sustainability, we don’t have a shot of moving beyond Easy Mode.

Yes, the planet will survive our shenanigans. But people are substantially less hardy than rocks. Our survival depends on what we do. We can be smarter than algae, or we can follow the path of stromatolites. It’s our choice.

And this idolization of recreating company towns, but in space, where the boss controls the air supply? That’s a low-hanging fruit of dystopia. We don’t even need to look at labour history to recognize what a bad idea that is.

Source: https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon/status/1218716524795568128

Some crazy laced agate under the microscope….🔬

Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), XLVIII (1914)

Throughout the entire galaxy wood is probably more rare than diamonds

Play video: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

Video by Thrown in the Dark Credit: ESA, NASA, cropped, edited. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/…)

buying a pintetest-y wall hanging with twee cursive lettering that reads "this place is a message, and part of a system of messages, pay attention to it! sending this message was important to us. we considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. this place is not a place of honor, no highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. what is here was dangerous and repulsive to us." to hang in my living room

hey i have a favor to ask from astronomers, can y'all put little krakens on the edges of maps of the observable universe to denote that we don't know what's past that

“What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’”

— Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)