Deepening awareness of the crisis toward the planet
Even if mankind perishes, the earth exists
You have to worry about running under limited conditions
“In 1957, a man-made Earth object was launched into space and orbited the Earth for weeks under the same laws of gravity that rotate the sun, moon, and stars.”
The renowned political philosopher Hannah Arendt begins with this sentence for his masterpiece,’Human Conditions’. This’Earth-mounted object’ is the first satellite Sputnik 1 launched by the former Soviet Union. Arendt predicted that after this event, when mankind first looked at the Earth from outside the Earth, mankind would not stay on Earth alone, but would face a new destiny. Shocked by the success of the Sputnik 1 launch, the United States landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, and continues to explore the solar system such as Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Recently, an unmanned rover Percipherance has been landed on Mars to collect scientific information. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is pursuing space travel and migration to the Moon and Mars with private capital within decades.
An interesting point is that a systematic understanding of the Earth begins in earnest only after the opening of the space age. The understanding of the earth is divided into before and after the establishment of the plate tectonic theory, which is a solid earth circulation theory. However, the theory of plate tectonics was established in the 1960s and is universally recognized only in the early 1970s. Until then, humans did not have a theory that could systematically explain why the Himalayas were high, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the Antarctic and Arctic frozen. Considering that Watson and Crick’s model of the molecular structure of DNA was discovered in 1953, it is very late.
With the opening of the space age, awareness about the Earth’s crisis also deepens. Months after the successful launch of Sputnik 1, American atmospheric scientist Charles Keeling embarked on a long journey of daily measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in Hawaii and Antarctica. As the data were accumulated, the phenomenon of increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was evident, and by the mid-1970s, this phenomenon was caused by an increase in the consumption of fossil fuels by mankind, and as a result, the earth became hot, warning that the survival of mankind could be threatened. Turned on. In 1963, Rachel Carson’s publication of’Silent Spring’ warned that DDT, a human-made chemical, could turn the Earth into a planet of death, and the global environmental movement began in earnest. In 1972, a report from the Roman Club reported that human growth is limited due to resource depletion and environmental pollution.
With the opening of the space age, the understanding of the Earth and the sense of crisis deepened at the same time because humans have the ability to stand in the perspective of the universe. It is called the Earth’s crisis, but to be precise, the subject of the crisis is not the Earth, but humans. Earth existed before humans existed and will exist for a long time even if humans perish. The Earth’s crisis is the human crisis created by mankind. Humanity is now at the crossroads of choice. Should I prepare to leave Earth? At the present technical level, the large-scale transfer of inhabitants to another planet does not require a long explanation. Earth will remain the most important place to live, even if the time comes when migration to other planets is possible. In the end, the topic given to mankind is to prepare concrete answers to the question of’how to lead life under the limited conditions of the earth’. To answer this question correctly, efforts are needed to better understand the Earth, the universe, and humans from various angles. We must also be on the lookout for optimism that the earth’s resources are infinite and the empty mystification of the earth that instigates vague anxiety. A new era that humanity has not experienced is calling for new questions and insights into humans, the earth, and the universe.
Director of Geospatial Research Division, Polar Research Institute
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