Weird Timing

So on Tuesday I publish a post on the need to start acting in harmony to save the Earth from man-made or natural catastrophes, and on Friday Sir Richard Branson announces the Virgin Earth Challenge: a $20M prize for the inventor of a device / technology that can counter-act global warming.

Now, ignoring how bizarre the timing of this is, I also noticed on Friday a tabloid headline claiming a £250M global lotto was being planned. The Times published this article on it today.

So the prize for saving the Earth is $20M, but the prize for buying a lotto ticket is £250M. I find this difference very telling, if slightly amusing in a "how perverted our value system has become" kind of way.

Anyway, when I first heard of the Virgin Earth Challenge, two things struck me:

1. Global warming is a symptom of a bigger issue, so any "solution" cannot be just about scrubbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but must include something to address the cause: basically a major planet-wide socio-political change, with a program of education aimed at multiple levels (governments, multi-national conglomerates, small/medium businesses, Joe public, children etc.) spanning many years, possibly even generations, until a more balanced and harmonious (co-)existence with our planet has become part of the collective psyche of our species.
2. The man-made planet-wide climate disruption is not just due to global warming. There is also Global Dimming to be taken into account. Basically this is an effect where small particles in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space, and surprise-surprise is increasing due to pollution. The really worrying aspect of this is that it is masking the full effects of Global Warming, and vice versa: reducing one without the other is likely to have a very profound and damaging effect on the planet. So the real challenge is not just to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but to detox the atmosphere itself, and return it to the kind of composition it had prior to the Industrial Age. This is a much more complex task.

I have to admit, I was very pleased to read in the full article about the Virgin Earth Challenge that Sir Crispin Tickell, a member of the overseeing committee said:

"We should not think that technology will be the only solution. We need to realise that this is a societal problem. This is the beginning of a period of transition and we can't expect it to happen tomorrow. We need to start thinking differently as a society."

Well said!!!

He also called the Virgin Earth Challenge "a symbolic gesture".

Wouldn't it be great if this symbolic gesture spurred other multi-millionaires/billionaires or multi-billion dollar organisations to sponsor similar planet-saving Challenges?

Who will be the first to sponsor a greater understanding of super-volcanism (e.g. the super volcano that is Yellowstone Nation Park), a thorough survey of the skies for Near Earth Objects, etc etc.

Who knows?!

Maybe, given the weird timing of things recently, I will wake up one day next week to hear that Bill Gates is donating $1B to the formation of a Centre for World Peace and Harmony: a place for cross-cultural education, a place for research into solutions for planet-wide problems, a place for diplomacy.

Sounds an awful lot like the Season 1 opening sequence of Babylon 5:

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the
Earth-Minbari war. The Babylon project was dream given form.

It's goal: To prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call; home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanders. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night.

It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace.

This is the story of last of the Babylon stations.

The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.

I can't help thinking that we are the planet's current last best hope for survival, and that we need a last best hope for our own survival.