# topic: exposition
# not purely fictional, but hopefully good thinks from my brain meat anyway
# author: wholesomedonut

Slamming around on my typewriter a month and some ago and came up with this little.. rant?

I don't know. See for yourself. I guess I captured an existential crisis moment on paper? Channeled the spirit of Carl Sagan? You decide.

---
November 14th, 2020

Have you ever stopped and taken a moment to think about this planet? And how significant it is that everything we know, everything we have, and everything we have ever been is centered squarely on this individual planetoid?

It boggles my mind that literally the entire history of humankind as mortal beings has played out on this world. We are solely reliant upon Mother Earth and her good graces for the survival of our entire species - just like every other species on Earth. We are light-years away from any other known stars, and therefore we are confined for the forseeable future to our own solar system. There is no Plan B that we can suddenly warp away to and expect mankind to survive. There is no Second Earth in the Alpha Centauri system that will save us from ourselves, if cruelty takes hold of our better senses and leads to the destruction of our cultures, our souls, and our homeworld. And to compound the severity of this reality, there are no planets or moons in our own solar system that could quickly and reliably become a home for the human race if we reached the point of no return in the engineering of our own world's climate change. If we go too far, there is no parachute to catch us as we step off the cliff into a spiraling extinction. Mars is similar in size, but too cold, too sparse of atmosphere, and too far away to warrant a solid chance of survival for all but the most blessed and fortunate of colonists. The majority of the remaining worlds in this system are gas giants, with a variety of moons in equally variant climate and compositions. This planet is the only one we know of in this star system or any other to have definitely provided the correct opportunities for carbon-based life to form as we know it. Furthermore, it was stable enough in this state for the millions of years that were required for mankind to emerge from more primal beings.

This stark reality has forced me to accept a worldview of love, peace, and well-wishing toward all of my fellow human beings. We live on this singular world together, and if we are not careful, we will all perish here as well, having never reached the stars we have gazed upon for millenia. We must push aside the differences that bind us to malice and warfare. A differing opinion is cause for discussion and learning, not fear or hatred. Segregation based on skin tones or ethnicity will mean absolutely nothing if it leads (and it invariably will) to the decline of our morality, the loss of our common human compassion, and the consequent loss of unity as the only sentient species to have walked this planet's soil in the millions of years we have existed. We have no other evidence beyond Genus Momo and its' several species that this world has harbored self-aware and advanced life forms before. If we are not cautioned by the mistakes of the past, and eager to overcome them, no other sentient life will be graced by Mother Earth's providence in the future, either.

We are alone. We are unique. We are sacred.

Divided we will all perish and return to the dust that made us.

Together we will reach out and touch the cosmos.