The Problem of Replacing a Planet

YOU DON'T EAT and defecate in the sae place. You put a little space, as much as possible, between the two bodily functions, We all know that now, but in the American Revolutionay War, it was apparetly not quite as obvious, because that was eactly what the rag tag continental American army-militia was essentially doing until the nineteen year old Prussian military whiz kid Baron Von Steuben pointed this out to the continentals, and got the outhosues moved away from the mess tent, and the rank and file. George Washington was presumably similarly aware of this fundamental truth, as were presumably many others, but nobody seems to have spoken up, been listened to, or taken remedial action before the yooung German stepped in and cleaned up the mess. When that got taken of, the sky was the limit for Washington and his often improperly uniformed troops, who had difficulty keeping themselves in shoes in the dead of winter. Move the latrines away, as far away as possible, from the mess tent. It that simple.Not sosimple is the question of precisely how to cleanup a filthy and dying planet,the only planet known to be habitable by human beings, and to reverse the decaying environment destruction precipitated by too much poisonous industrial residue being thron aside to close to too many vital, life sustaining resources, such as rives, lakes, oceans, pastures, forests, and cities. True,the planet earth is, or seems to be, self healing. But like any mechanized system or organic living body, can only take so much damage before giving up the ghos,t and dying. We've been getting warnings for centuries, and ignoring them. As early as the early nineteenth century astute observers of human beings and their relationship to and treatment of their environment, such as Gustavus Ahrinnius, have been tellling us that we are behaving badly, going in the wrong direction with our hedonistic, unconcerned behavior without self examination, and that sooner rather than later, the bill will come due, and we may not be able to pay it. Carl Sagan warned us that merely abandoning a dying planet Earth and shipping out to a newer, cleaner world is not the answer, that such a pristine option may or not may not exist. Sagan died before we began to discover that our immediate stellar region, and thus quite probably our galaxy and the entire universe, quite liley filled with stars with solar systems of orbiting planetary bodies, and although he didn't lives to see his speculation confirmed, it now has been. The Milky Way galaxy, and probaly all other galaxies, are up to their necks in planets orbiting stars, and, one an conjecture by extension, full of life itself, whether "intelligent" or not. True, we may in the future build artifical habitats in space, and we my soon find habitable but uninhabited planets suitable for human colonization, but we'd better not count on it. A good read is the monograph "Our Angry Earth", by Fredric Pohl and Isaac Asimov, published in the long ago year 1992, back when we weren't even all that sure of what we were talking about. We are not going to transfer human life to a fresh, clean planet. The mess we have made we will either clean up, or die trying to, or die wallowing languidly in it, whichever. Throughout its history the human species has migrated nomadically, seeking new living space to replace dying living space, ruined habitat. On a planet with a finite mass, that only gets you so far. People are probably getting tired of being lectured to about their wasteful, destructive lifestyles. Can we even imgagine how tired they and their descendants will become of gasping for air and watching their bodies and health wither away in cities where the air is unbreathable and the food and water unusable? As Bertolt Brecht poetically wrote: "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them". We alone can flip that script.