I wanted to write an essay in response to some excellent comments.  I usually comment back on the site, but I feel too many of us are so wrapped up in the busy-ness of life that we don’t have enough time or energy left to go back to read comments made to our comments.  Conversations building up on top of one another.  More and more data in our lives.  Iphones with schedules, and emails, and texts, and music, and facebook, and instant messaging everywhere we go.  Who would want to build a stockpile of comment link to check on every night for other comments.

So our ideas are being sold cheap.  They are merely digital bits of expression that are piled high on top of one another to be forgotten in the time you can say millisecond.  So I decided to take comments that should not be forgotten and refresh them once in a while.

Charlie recently posted how despite our insane way of life, the earth will live on.  Indeed, you are right my friend.  You and I witnessed first hand how powerful the balance of nature is.  While we were in Africa, part of our stay was in a national park called Tarangire.  This park was unique in a sense that you stayed in tents.  You had not room.  Rather you slept in the middle of the Serengetti with animals that consider you prey, in a tent.  All that separates you from them at night is a thin sheet of cloth.  And I lest I remind you that most of these predators are nocturnal. 

The rules were if you had to leave your tent after Sundown, you had to blow a whistle.  A national guard would then come to your tent, who by the way is armed with a live AK-47, banana clip and all.  He would then escort you from your tent.  This procedure was so that you weren’t dinner for a lion, or some other skilled predator.

The power of nature and it’s ability to continue is a reality.  We truly are insignificant.  But that is not the core philosophy of The Ultimate Spaceship.  The perspective that I want to share with people is one that places us, homo sapien sapien, in the role of responsibility.  We are the conscious, cognitive scientists of the planet.  Our reason is what is capable of engineering measures to protect the Earth from catastrophic death.  We have in a short time (10,000 years of civilization) travelled off our home planet, harnessed the force of electricity, understood the principles of the most basic building blocks of life (atoms), and developed a parallel universe that has a life blood of it’s own (the internet… don’t believe me?  Play with this tool: http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar

With this kind of ability, it would not be long before we would be able to figure out how to develop solutions that protect life from a warming Sun, or catastrophic asteroid collision.  These seem like outlandish ideas… science fiction.  But imagine a primitive human 10,000 years ago forecasting for another human a future where everyone would have thin plastic devices in their hands that they could talk to each other and see each other when ever they wanted.  In that era, you would be considered crazy, but today it’s normal.  Cell phones with internet access and video streaming have made that a reality.

So yes, the world will live on.  But all that does for us is prove that we are failures as the most costly and advanced creation of nature.  That is because for us to get this advanced, we HAD to use nature’s resources to become this advanced.  It would be impossible to understand the atom in a comprehensive scientific way without the use particle accelerators.  Making all this science cost nature a lot of it’s resources, but if you look at this as an investment, it makes sense.  Homo sapien with the expenditure of a big chunk of resources, can educate itself to a level that could save the rest of life, indefinitely.

This sounds great in theory, but there was a derailment.  We lost our way.  We developed science and started to learn.  But then somewhere along the way we developed consumerism and started to use science to develop products for easier consumption.  Easier food to eat, easier drinks to have, easier and lazier.  Lazier and lazier.

Today, our science is trying to dig itself out of a self imposed drowning in the quicksand of symptoms associated with our mass consumption.  Diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, psychologic problems, and depression.  We are so lost that we can’t even diagnose that these diseases come from our insatiable appetite to consume. 

This really is the final moment, the final act for humanity to show that it IS worth the effort and sacrifice nature put into creating the masterpiece we call homo sapien sapien.  Look at it this way, with the amount of bailing out that’s going on today, how valuable is that Louis Vuitton purse of yours?  Money is losing is luster.  It is starting to crack under pressure.  Unlike the elegant strength in a mountain like Kilimanjaro.  Every one of us sleeping under the canopy of our moon has to remember that our role is not to buy things, but to protect and create life. 

I think what’s more powerful than our leaders making changes for us is what WE do.  What WE buy.  How we CHOOSE to spend our money and our time.  Imagine if EVERY American stopped buying Coca Cola because it used High Fructose Corn Syrup?  Imagine what would happen if EVERY American turned off their televisions and started spending time OUTSIDE with their families, interacting?  Imagine what would happen is people started investing in education instead of the stock market?

These seem like impossibilities, but none of the above scenarios is obscene or so different than our normal “standard” human lives, that we would suffer considerably doing them.  I can’t imagine any American that would notice a decrease in their health if they stopped drinking soda.  All of these habits are in your heads.  They were sold to you and made okay with complex and well designed marketing.  And you are so deeply entrapped in the illusion, that you cannot imagine a world without strong leaders changing things.  Where really, the change happens from within.

Every time I write, I remember a comment made by Narges, that it is human nature to satisfy our own urges and desires first before looking outside to help others.  But like I commented, that really truly makes me sad.  It actually breaks my heart… that we are so deeply brainwashed that we cannot remember just a few thousand years ago, we lived in villages where each of us participated in the care taking of others.  Where doing what benefitted the tribe outweighed what benefited you.  This was an era before economy (or one like our model).

If you want a shortcut to awakening, all you have to do is try to experience what it feels like being prey again.  Most humans live their entire lives (and deaths) without ever being worried or concerned about being eaten.  We are no longer prey.  Like I have said before, we have pulled ourselves out of the food chain.  Immerse yourself in nature, and you will quickly realize that your Blackberry, your flashlight, even your gun, are eventually useless, because you will run out of batteries, and bullets.  Nature will carry on.

So in Tarangire, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Serengetti, Charlie and I decided to break the rules and hang out outside of our tent watching the stars and listen to music (one of the other miracles of being human).  The proof of my essay is when our neighbor tent shushed us, as if we were violating some city ordinance code in the middle of f*ing nowhere.  Talk about conditioned hairless apes, they follow the rules, even in a place where there are no rules.

So let’s take some bets.  Who bets that

A) Humans wake up before it’s too late, and end the era of consumerism, and start the era of sustainability?

Or

B) We keep buying shit from WalMart and Costco, taking it home in our SUVs, only to move it to storage units because we already have too much shit... oh and it all ends in catastrophe?

And please, please, please don’t turn this into a religious thing… every religion has a “revelations” chapter and the coming of their respective savior… so that is a cop out way not to participate… because if you choose A, then you are committing to participate.  And if you choose B, you are coming up with an excuse not to.