We're All Just Space Dust

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LISTENING: to the Artemis II livestream
FEELING: enraged and paralyzed
SEEING: the Artemis II livestream

While Donald Trump issues threats of nuclear holocaust to Iran, four astronauts fly over 200,000 miles away, slowly returning to Earth.

Eight billion people share this one planet we get to call home. It's the only home humanity has ever known — the same lands where dinosaurs once walked are where our great-grandchildren will likely live someday. Unless interstellar colonization really takes off, or if evil people like Trump don't manage to blow everything up.

I write this on Tuesday, ahead of knowing what the president will do. (My sister's birthday is Wednesday, so I'll be offline most of the day. I am relieved Trump didn't nuke Iran but disheartened that Israel bombed Lebanon instead.) What I do know is this: War devastates human and ecological health, as well as the stability of our biosphere. Nuclear pollution sickens the more-than-human creatures many of us rely on for sustenance. It disrupts our ocean and marine neighbors. We are connected to the world's water system. Nuclear war also has the potential to transform our weather and climate patterns, throwing an already-unpredictable system (thanks to fossil fuel pollution) into further disarray.

World leaders have already ruined our planet's balance. Our existence is a divine miracle. We live on a planet with the perfect set of conditions to breed life. Conditions we have yet to find on any other planet nearby. The land nurtures us, feeds us, keeps us safe. What a gift that we all live in the timeline where we can connect online and be in virtual communion with one another. That we can witness — from our handheld devices — the awesomeness of science and space exploration.

Instead of practicing gratitude, people like Trump want to exhibit force and an iron fist. They relish in acts of power and triumph. Not the stillness and softness the world so desperately needs. Even this moon mission, as magical as it feels, is ultimately about putting people back on the moon before China does. That information killed some of the magic for me.

Earth will be OK — she always is. She will stand the test of time despite the harm world leaders inflict on her. But people — entire families and cities and countries and cultures — will not. Neither will our four-legged, winged, or finned relatives.

We can't claim to care about Earth and stay silent in the name of violence, especially at this grand scale. There's one climate advocate who never shies away from this brutal connection: Greta Thunberg. She worded this moment quite urgently in a video shared to Instagram Tuesday:

"We have normalized genocide, total annihilation of entire people, the systematic destruction of the biosphere [that] we are all depending on to survive, and that corrupt, racist war criminals can act with complete impunity...Even though we have allowed far too much so far, it is not too late to say stop."

By the time you read this, we'll know whether Trump acted on his sick fantasies. Let's hope humanity wasn't too late to stop him. Let's hope enough of us said stop. 🌀

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