Earth, 4.56 billion years old, in a galaxy that is 13.2 billion years old, is a tiny planet about 8,000 miles in diameter, 24,000 miles in circumference, and three-millionths the size of the star we call the sun.
Our planet exists in a narrow and fragile band — the “habitable zone” — of our solar system, one of some 200 to 400 billion solar systems in the Milky Way Galaxy, one of trillions of galaxies in the universe, which may be — as a number of astrophysicists believe — one of countless universes in a “multiverse.”
To travel to the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda, travelling at 186,000 miles per second would take two million five-hundred thousand years.
Earth is populated by vast kingdoms of land- and water-based plants and animals. We humans are one of about 5,500 species of mammals that exist among birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and arthropods.
We showed up about 300,000 years ago in the south and east of what we now call Africa. About 100,000 years ago, we began our migration north and reached what we now call Asia about 50,000 years ago. From there, we spread east and west. We reached what we now call the Americas about 12,000 years ago.
Human population, currently at nearly eight billion, is growing at a rate in excess of 1,500,000 weekly.
The social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of humanity break out fairly evenly between the left and right into what is referred to as a “normal distribution” that results in opposition, conflict, and strife up to and including wars.
Humans fighting with each other every day, everywhere, over everything imaginable contributes to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainties.
While this fighting is ongoing, humans must contend with the fickleness of nature: earthquakes, hurricanes (typhoons, cyclones), volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other severe weather phenomena — all normal to living on one of these things we call “planets,” even when one exists in the “habitable zone” of a solar system.
Also contributing to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainties are the extraordinary array of illnesses we contract and from which we suffer, countless accidents and injuries that occur regularly, all manner of addictions and substance abuse, and all kinds of criminal and deviant behavior going on every day, everywhere, in every way imaginable.
As if all of this is not already way more than enough for us to deal with, we humans — as a consequence of not understanding our reality and its behavioral demands — have created an interrelated web of life threatening environmental problems.
While humans have always altered the natural environment, today’s unprecedented scale of disruptions is beyond ominous.
Humanity, in depleting its resources — forests, fisheries, range lands, croplands, and plant and animal species — is destroying the biological diversity on which evolution thrives.
The ongoing 6th Great Extinction — the first caused by other than a natural event like an asteroid striking the planet or climate change — is caused by our species. Climate change, incidentally, caused four out of the five Great Extinctions.
We are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables.
We are polluting our air, water, and our soil and, consequently, our food chain. We now have microplastic contaminants in our food and water. That is a result of dumping about 14 million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually!
We are depleting the stratospheric ozone that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
We are experiencing many symptoms associated with global warming and consequential climate change such as heat waves, devastating droughts, destruction of croplands, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, destruction of coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal flooding, more rapid spread of diseases, acidification and poisoning of the oceans, famine and starvation, human migration, heat deaths, economic collapse, social conflict, and potential wars.
The above is far from an exhaustive list of environmentally related problems.
And further, problems of these magnitudes interact with each other to cause ominous, unpredictable, and unprecedented synergistic compounding problems termed multi-hazards, the complexity of which progressively undermines our ability to respond.
As a consequence of all of the above, the scale of human migration, already at unprecedented levels, is growing dramatically.
In sum, humanity’s foreboding pattern of rapacious capitalism and excessive consumption driven by short-term thinking and gratification has created a destructive and unsustainable momentum for itself that must be arrested in reversed if it is to succeed as a species.
Simply put, if humanity wishes to continue as part of the phenomenon of evolution, it must rise above primitive tribal instincts and emotions associated with the primitive origins of our brains, and above antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional supernatural religious beliefs — human fabrications — that are products of the infancy of our intelligence and have billions of people, who live in a world of fiction and fantasy, believe they will be “saved” or better off in some future afterlife.
The bottom line is that our mental infrastructure — our mentality and emotions — is outdated for the world in which we live today.
Our primitive behavior and supernatural beliefs do not work on a tiny planet with fragile ecosystems hosting eight billion of us — with the addition of in excess of 1,500,000 more weekly — and countless other life forms in existing plant and animal kingdoms.
What is required is a nonreligious understanding of and respect for what is sacred in our world: those relationships in life — with ourself, each other, and our biosphere — that we cannot violate, damage, dishonor, or destroy.