I Love Earth

~ J.S. Pailly

Hello, friends!

As you know, I love space, and as you might imagine, I socialize with a lot of other people (both online and I.R.L.) who also love space.  But in the last year or so, I’ve noticed a change in the space love community.  It used to be that if you loved space, it naturally followed that you also loved planet Earth.  But that’s not the case anymore.  Not for everybody.  These days, for some people, it seems that love for space equals disdain for Earth.

I’ve seen this disdain for Earth expressed in some of the recent discourse about the Moon and Mars, as well as other proposals for the colonization of outer space: rotating space stations, generation ships to other star systems, far future megastructures encircling our Sun.  Basically, these people say Earth sucks.  Earth is boring.  And Earth’s doomed anyway, so let’s cut our loses and move on from this stupid blue planet.  Let’s all go to Mars, or Proxima Centauri, or anywhere else that might be nominally habitable for humans.

So I want you to know something: when I say I love space, that does not mean I share in this weird disdain for Earth.  As of the time of this writing, astronomers have confirmed the discovery of about 6000 exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our Sun), but they have yet to confirm the existence of a single exoEarth.  Not one.  For me, loving space means having the context to understand how extremely rare, extremely special, and extremely precious Earth is.

I love space.  It naturally follows from my love of space that I also feel a deep and profound love for the Earth, too.  How about you?

The art in today’s post is my own original work.  I didn’t take it from the Internet or ask an A.I. to generate it.  If you like my art, please consider visiting my store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me!) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!

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Published by J.S. Pailly

8 thoughts on “I Love Earth”

  1. Earth better not be doomed, and of course, it isn’t. No matter how bad things may get, I can breath here, walk outside without technological support (dance naked on the deck of my rural home, if I choose, and not bother a soul.) If we develop the technology to terraform other worlds, then surely we’ll be able to deal with comparatively minor blips on Earth. Yes. I love Earth.

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    1. Yeah, even in the most dire worst case scenarios for Earth, we’ll still be better off here than we would be on the Moon or Mars. Space exploration still has a lot of value, too, of course. Terraforming Mars could even help us learn what we need to learn in order to fix some of the damage we’ve done to Earth.

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  2. When I was young, I have to admit I had disdain for Earth. It seemed crowded, noisy, dirty, and complicated. Space seemed pristine. Of course, I had my head full of misconceptions from science fiction. As you noted, we haven’t discovered any exoEarths yet. Even when we do, the idea that we could live on any of them without modifying either them or us seems unlikely.

    We evolved on Earth. It’s a paradise compared to anything we’ll be able to reach for the foreseeable future.

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    1. Yeah, even if we find an exoEarth, there’s almost no chance we’d be compatible with the alien biosphere. In some ways, that could be more dangerous for us than a barren world like the Moon or Mars.

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      1. I used a relatively mild form of your idea in my last novel. Settlers allergic to their new world. Possibly fatal, but generally scary enough for most of them to live inside buildings, almost like they were on Mars.

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