Campfyre Stories

Space, the final frontier.  If that’s really the case, then why haven’t we saved it for last?  You’d think…  I’d think, anyway, that we would want to know our own planet through and through before going off and looking for others.  I don’t think it’s just me. 

There is more than half of the planet that remains unexplored because we simply haven’t invested the time and energy into it that we have into the space program.  We’re seeking "new life and new civilizations", but every year we find actual new life that we didn’t know about when we attempt to go "where no man has gone before."  Wow.  Check it out, alien species living on our very own planet. 

We even suspect that some of them might be intelligent, but we temper that with a tendency to patronize them and teach them to entertain children and jump through literal hoops.  Still, though, we search the skies in hopes of finding creatures with whom we can communicate and teach/learn from.  Maybe we don’t want to share.  More likely, I think, we don’t want to run the risk of being shown up.

You may be asking yourself, at this point, what prompted this?  Why now, Fyre?  This certainly came out of the blue.  Except that it didn’t.  Not really. 

You see, two news stories caught my eye yesterday, one more than the other, however,  while the first has imaginations racing, the second and more interesting bit of business has gone mostly unnoticed.  

1) Scientists found a planet that is more like Earth than any other planet that has yet been found.  In is in a different galaxy and has a Red Dwarf sun, but it has set people’s scifi penchant on fire.  I have seen more references to a “Class M” planet than I care to count.  Even though we won’t be voyaging to this planet within the lifetimes of the people reading this, most people are overly excited.

2) Archaeologists found Atlantis.  Okay, okay, not *really* Atlantis, probably, since that’s fabled to be an advanced society and this is a primitive, prehistoric one, but they found a sunken city in the North Sea.  Now me, I find this riveting.  I love history and a find like this is astounding, but when you consider how little we know about what’s below a certain number of fathoms, it is really all that surprising that we would find things we never knew existed?  That’s the part that people don’t understand – we already DO find things we never knew existed.  We find them underwater.  All the time.

It often seems like we treat this planet like a temporary home.  We don’t intend to stay any longer than we have to.  As soon as we figure out how to get to that other planet we are OUT OF HERE.  Right?  Long gone are the fantasies of tapping into the depths of the ocean and building the glass-domed, pressurized underwater cities, we don’t just want to leave town, we want to leave the solar system.  Can you imagine if you lived in a house your entire life and never went into the basement?  Can you imagine not learning the street names in your town, but memorizing street maps for cities on other continents?  This is the state that we are in now.  So many have lost interest in what is new and potentially exciting here for the thrill of something they will never know in their lifetime.

I’ve always felt this way about space exploration and the lack of exploration and technological research that goes into our own planet, but never before has it been so strongly presented to me when great and incredible things came from both underwater and outer space.  But which one caught more attention?  Which one caught yours?