Why looking at stars made Earth more important

I was always fascinated by stars, planets, and the possible life out there. I still remember when I was a kid; my great-grandpa passed away, I was told by somebody that he had now become a star in the sky. Maybe it was my grandpa itself who implanted all these stories in me. Now, every time I look at the sky, the same feeling comes along with every gaze I take. There is awe and fascination only. If you’ve never got the chance, just take a look here every day.

I do not think this is me only, I am sure there are a lot of people around the world who feel the same. We all want to know, where we came from. What are we doing here? And Is there anyone out there or are we alone? Questions like this will come to mind. We all want to go out and look for answers to all these gigantic questions. This is what humans have been doing all along, we went on voyages and sailed around the world. This is how we have found new continents, new people, new things. But our journey has not yet ended yet and we are still looking for the answers to the same questions, but now our ambitions are much bigger. We want to look on, at new planets, and new galaxies that we have found, and answers to the same questions. I would vehemently support such enquiries and will also participate in such endeavours.

But there is one thing I have observed over the years and it also bothers me some time. This may be mine and mine opinion only and I may not be correct. In search of all these answers we have forgotten our home, “The Earth”. People want to move to Mars, terraform Venus etc., it’s like they want to escape from the problems we have here on Earth. With the advent of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and all these problems, we seem to be overwhelmed and as the natural human instinct, we may want to just flee. Ideas like colonising Mars are great but they are not going to solve our problems, that’s the reality and we need to face it. We are not going anywhere at least in the short run of some hundreds of years and even If we may have the means, the earth will always be our home. I would never want to leave our home and not to return one day.

So I’ll present some arguments why leaving the earth is not possible but it is the most foolish idea one could have:

1. Earth is our home, we were born here, and our ancestors lived here, and died here. Even explorers don’t just trash out their homes and just leave to look for another place. We explorers, wander around the world, looking for new things but in the end, we return to our home and take care of it.

2. There is so much to explore on Earth that may be outside of Earth. We have such vast oceans that we have barely explored, still to this day every single time researchers take a dip into deep oceans, we find new species that no one could have imagined.

3. As far as we know to this date, there is only one confirmed place where life exists, it’s our pale blue dot “The Earth”. Why are we looking out there for something when we are living surrounded by it? There are so many different kinds of life, our understanding of them has just barely scratched the surface. There are around 8.7 million species we have discovered to this date and one amazing part is that the estimates suggest that 80% of species are yet to be discovered.¹ Taxonomic catalogues are still incomplete for well-known species, and researchers are still finding species so rare that as soon as they find them, they go extinct. ²

4. As of June 2024, only 26.1% of the global seafloor has been mapped, we still know so less about our waters, we may have mapped stars and galaxies but we still have a long way to go when it comes to oceans.

5. Mapping the seafloor is one thing, actually figuring out what life is there is another thing. Estimates show that there may be between 700,000 and 1 million species in the ocean. These are mostly animals and exclude most microorganisms, which are estimated to be in millions. This means that two-thirds of these are yet to be discovered and around 2000 new species are found and accepted every year.³

6. We still don’t know how the earth’s core exactly works and researchers keep finding new things. ⁴Researchers recently found out that the earth’s core changes shape and its rate of rotation over decades and how researchers figure that out is more interesting.⁵

7. We still don’t properly understand how the earth’s magnetic field works and how it stayed for billions of years. If you don’t care about the magnetic field then you should because, the theory says that life exists on Earth because has a magnetic field, otherwise we would have been some barren planet like Mars with no atmosphere and fried by the radiation from Earth. ⁶⁷

8. Another thing is the clouds, we all see them, and feel them but do we understand them, NO! Clouds are much complicated than we think and they give a very hard time to meteorologists who are trying to predict weather. Clouds and aerosols are one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in all weather and climate models. ⁸

These are just some of the things from the top of my head, that fascinate and puzzle me about the earth. Understanding and solving problems on earth will not only save us but may open new doors of understanding about the universe. We do not need to go to Mars and figure out “Novel ways of dying” as Sabine said, we need to think and solve our problems here, which will open the doors for the whole universe. I would end with just one line,

“A good journey starts from home”.

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