World Night Lights….and Population

Where Do We Go From Here?

Wow, do we cover the globe now.  Billions of us are in evidence here, and the lights tell the story.  There are not many places we’ve left unlit, and enlarging the map tells the story even better.  Giant veins run across Europe through Asia, a highway of lights I did not conceptualize until I really studied this photo.  Lights are even seen in the heart of the Amazon, in the middle of the African heartlands, the center of the Australian bush, obliterating views of islands around the world’s seas.  Where do we go from here?  Do we build up, and learn how to be constant recyclers in our city centers?  Do we build in the sky and sea?  Where do we encourage our children’s vision? 

One direction we are headed is towards creativity unrivaled in man’s history.  A simple web search turns up fantastical images, not just fiction, but ideas by engineers and dreamers and builders, contests entered and publicity gained.  Some of those images can be seen here http://bit.ly/gEeVg5 .  Dreamers are dreaming big, from lilypad cities with shapes that look as if they’ll take flight, to sunken float-pads seemingly screaming defiance to potential rogue waves.   It will take vision of these magnitudes to give us the solutions to our population sprawl.  We are going to have to start engineering a world-within-a-world, mini-worlds floating above or upon our ever-smaller planet, fantasy images come-to-life….it must be so grand, until we can soar beyond our atmosphere to planets beyond with relative ease and minimal risk.

And that is a long way off.  The nearest habitable planet maybe a few light-years away, or it may be hundreds of light-years away, but it remains to be found.    Engineering that travel is beyond our fathoming…we cannot yet travel near the speed of light to even think of getting there within a lifetime.   For those not science minded, a lightyear is the distance covered by light traveling through space for an entire year.    Our fastest travel currently might be exemplified by NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Mission ( http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ )which reached the moon in slightly over eight and a half hours, a far cry from the speed of light which moves from moon to our Earth in less than a couple of seconds (!).  Our future, if we don’t join forces to manage the Earth’s resources, may be as space nomads if we could engineer that mammoth idea.   So until we can engineer that fantasy, we must join to build the fantastical upon the Earth.

The world of our children’s future is nothing like our past.  It will be a fantasy world come to life…and if not, there will not be room.  So it must be.   A quote from NASA’s Archive: “A manned rocket reaches the Moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England” ( http://1.usa.gov/b3ZRE ).  Now certainly that rocket flight seemed more fantasy to the stagecoach driver of yesterday than does our current foggy ideas of our future.  It is our responsibility to not give up, but to turn to our children with encouraging and believing eyes, is it not?  New creation is only born of belief.   

What will this map look like in one hundred years?  In 500 years?  Will there be such a map to ponder?

Teaching Our Children

Climbing the Planet's Truths vs Seeking Vision

I am surrounded by healthy, playing children in my neighborhood, tens of them on my block alone.  I have my own child and my own nieces and nephews, and their hopes and dreams and joys fill their eyes and overflow to touch my heart.  At what point do we burden them with the heaviness of our planet’s challenges?  At what point do we begin to lessen our censorship of what they hear, lessen our re-wording of what they experience?  At what point do we let them make their own conclusions?

My daughter sees a quick flash of Japan’s devastation, and I quickly temper that with “people are now rebuilding, it will be rebuilt, don’t worry.  Yes, sometimes there are earthquakes and tsunamis, and we just pay attention to make sure we keep safe.  We also send Japan food and help to rebuild, just as they would do for us if we needed.”    Right or wrong coaching?  She knows our general earthquake plan, but I shield her still from the blood and gore of what has happened.  I am definitely not explaining to her yet that the earth has shifted on its axis, and in trying to explain that Japan moved several inches I only baffled her.  The world is so solid to her still.  Am I wrong to censor her at age six?  Would it be wrong at age seven?  Eight?  Ten?

I have seen the value in my own life of belief.  When we believe, the world responds to our belief, and by that we usually mean people, and perhaps our pets.   People respond to our confidence by following, evidenced by the hoards of celebrities owning confidence and thus owning millions of followers, talent or no talent.  Belief seems their greatest asset and is responsible for their fame and fortune.   And people respond to our expressed fears or outward cowardice by either seeing us as weak or even outright attack.  There exists quasi-science (and perhaps now real reproducible science, haven’t checked lately) that shows that even plants may be reacting to our general vibe, our attitude, our intentions.  If people, pets, and perhaps plants react to our inner vibe, can the rest of the world, our natural world, begin to respond to our desires and visions of it being in balance and whole?  If we confidently envision the world healed and a working ecosystem, will it respond?  And if it does, will it respond in a timeline that includes us?