Of this Earth

I have been thinking about the Earth lately…it’s vastness, generosity, complexity, perfect balance and welcoming nature, a real home to all forms of life unlike any other planet in the Solar System.

Something good came out after all of all the flat earth theories I’ve been laughing about on one hand and desperately trying to understand the logic of, on the other. And I don’t even care if you believe it’s flat, round, square, octupus shaped or hollow. That is absolutely irrelevant to the actual bigger picture: us, passing the torch to a new generation. What do we leave them with? Are our preachings backed up by actions? Will we be keeping our promises? And how much do we really care about a future that doesn’t include us?

We keep coming up with “how to” and “what if” ideas, but most of us stop there. We become judgemental of others’ behaviour and don’t actually do anything about our own greediness and sense of entitlement. We take and take…until there will be nothing left. We’re filling up supermarket shopping carts with the food that we will be throwing away tomorrow. In some families, each member is driving their own car. Most of us are much too lazy to recycle. We love eating at nice restaurants – it’s comforting to know that someone else will be cleaning up our mess and throwing away our leftovers for a change.

In this scenario, it will be our children and our children’s children.

We believe this planet is ours to mutilate and sacrifice for our own entertainment because we’re here now – it’s rightful inheritants – instead, we should go through life with the respect and piousness of gentle, discreet passers-by. We think no further than tomorrow, it would be too much trouble. We never think about this planet seriously, because it doesn’t matter if there will be anything left of it after we’re gone. We won’t be here to suffer the consequences of our own inactions – but our children will.

Stop and imagine for a moment John Cage’s composition for organ called “Organ2/As Slow As Possible” that is being performed since 2001 in St. Buchardi church in Halberstadt, a small town in Germany (if everything goes as planned, the last note will be heard in the year 2640 – 621 years from now!). Imagine that the people who’ve heard the first notes would never hear the end of the piece and vice-versa. Imagine our succesors six hundred years from now…it’s almost impossible, isn’t it? What will they say about us? In what language? Will they be human, (dancer) or androids? Will they still care about John Cage’s composition – or anything that mattered to us? And most of all, will there still be an Earth for them to exist on?

Meanwhile, we wouldn’t even be able to breathe, let alone survive on planets like, let’s say Mercury, with it’s immense variations in temperature (from 427°C on the side that faces the Sun to -173°C on the side that is in the shadow), a total lack of atmosphere and an exosphere that is said to have been formed from Sun particles (yet it is incapable of retaining any heat from it), volcanic outgassing and debris thrown into orbit through impact with micrometeorites.

Let’s imagine for a moment that our bodies could adapt to continuous exposure to temperatures as high as 462 °C, air that’s composed mostly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, clouds that spit sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid and strong winds that reach speeds of 300km/h (as space probes have discovered on our “twin planet”, Venus), but what would our lives be like in such case? How would that affect our mental health? What would our skin look like? What kind of Art would there be in such extreme conditions? What would music sound like? What type of diseases would we suffer from? What languages would we speak? Actually, recent studies suggest that the Earth’s atmosphere would have evolved similarly to that of Venus, had it been only 5% closer to the Sun during the evolution of the atmosphere. Lukcy us, right? – for not having to actually ask ourselves all these questions…

What about Mars, with it’s thin atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, argon and traces of nitrogen, water, methane and oxygen and an average temperature of -63°C – or Jupiter, a gas giant covered in ammonia crystals and amonium hydrosulfide? Would we stand a chance there? And even if we did, wouldn’t we rather be dead?

Many of us love the smell of rain so much so, that we’ve made up a distinct word for it – we call it petrichor. But what if it rained ammonia, acetylene, ethane, propane, phosphine methane, like on Saturn, or ammonium hydrosulfide and hydrogene sulfyde, like it does on Uranus? What would we call it then? What would it smell like? What would our bodies’ chemical composition be? And, most of all, what would love be like in such extreme conditions?

How would we express emotions on a toxic gas planet like Neptune, being so used to inhaling nytrogen, helium, methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide that it would come naturally?

And I don’t care how many Earth-like planets have been discovered, there is only one Earth and so far, most of us have done nothing but take it’s richess for granted. I myself haven’t done much, but there is a perfect time and place to repent and change something.

Since Monday, the 15th of April, London is home to numerous “rebels” from different organizations. The most important of them is “extinction rebellion” (XR), a non-violent group that was formed in 2018 whose main concern is the imminent ecological collapse.

As a consequence of their engagement, traffic in the most important locations in central London will be disrupted indefinitely and replaced by ad-hoc musical performances, trainings, workshops, peoples’ assemblies – Waterloo Bridge has morphed into a walking/bike path, a pink yacht was parked in the middle of Oxford Circus, Marble Arch was turned into a tent campsite and rebels have been doing everything to get themselves arrested.

It’s Vama Veche mixed with Bucharest’s Street Delivery and any-hippie-festival-ever vibe to the whole event and the feeling of being part of something more important than myself is absolute heaven. I can’t imagine doing anything else but staying here, humbled by these weird, colorful, peaceful, bubble making, dancing fighters for the Earth.