Seriously, Why Does It Matter?
I just woke up, and the first thing I do when I wake up, is check the news. Many different tabs of news: Top, US, Local (NYC), Entertainment, Tech, Android (go #teamandroid), Science, and the dreaded Politics.
I reach the Science tab, and I see the top news for that category — NASA has discovered a solar system with 7 Earth-sized planets (named B-H) orbiting its star, TRAPPIST-1 (named A)… 39 light-years away. Now, don’t get me wrong. Astronomy is very interesting to say the least. I even wrote a paper about it back in my junior year of high school, just for the fun of it. But to give us news like this is really pointless for many reasons.
- “39 light-years away. That’s around 235 trillion miles.” Once I read that, in my head I’m like “….okay??” What am I supposed to do with this kind of information? We don’t even have the technology to even travel that far, neither the money for us to survive the journey.
- Say we did have the money and resources to go visit these 7 planets. Now what? We’d have to do tons of research once we reach those planets, research that’ll take years.
- In my opinion, it’s going to be the same s**t we’re doing here. It’s just another way to branch out our failure as a planet. Once we inhabit that planet or those planets, we’ll just continue whatever’s going on in this planet we call Earth. War, famine (right off the bat), and how many of us will truly adapt to this new ecosystem? It may be Earth-sized, but we’ll never know if it’s “Earth 2.0.”
- I just thought of this. There are 7 continents on Earth, correct? Don’t mind the recent news about the “8th continent.” We just discovered 7 Earth-sized planets. What if each continent gets its own planet? Sounds like a good idea, right? Wrong. We have all have our own continents/space. North America has the US and the wonderfully admired Canada. Asia has China, India, etc. If we were to do what I mentioned a few sentences ago, we’d just find ways to become interdependent with each other. We (the US) might have planet F, where we have all the oil we can ever ask for, while Asia might have Planet C, where it has all the diamonds in the world. Can you predict what happens next? I think you can.
Moral of the article, I think news like this should be labeled “interesting news,” nothing more. We gained hopeful knowledge from it, but it won’t help us now, nor in 10 years from now. We have way too many problems here to be focused on this. What happened to Mars?…
-Joel
