"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Think Big: What's Next? Our Next Foreseeable Threats, From Diseases to Climate Change
If we want to come together - we have to Think Big and Get Serious.
Think Big:
About Our Problems
Let's Think Big about the Three Biggest Problems that affect us locally and globally:
- Population Growth
- Economic Decline
- Climate Change
This imagine of the Earth (...the small dot in the pink beam of light) was taken by the US funded Voyager Space Craft - which is the furtherest Man-Made Object from earth. Scientist Carl Sagan and other scientists programmed the spacecraft to turn around at 3.7billion miles away - and take a picture of earth and all humanity - precisely to show us our truest reality: we're just a speck of dust floating in the Universe, with only each other to depend on for survival.
It's time to
Think Big and Get Serious
As a general starting point, I’ve tried to distill our (ie., humanity’s and Massachusetts’) problems into Our Three Biggest Issues:
Think Big. Get Serious.
To respond to Population Growth:
We need to invest heavily in scientific advancement in order to make the scientific breakthroughs we need to meet our future resource demands, especially for our most essential resources: Food, Water, Energy, and Information.
Get Serious:
About The Solutions
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” - Astronaut Edgar Mitchell on first seeing Earth from Outerspace
To respond to Climate Change:
We need to invest in infrastructure and scientific innovation in Food, Water, Energy to: decrease carbon emissions and pollution, increase energy efficiency, increase water efficiency, and advance food, water, energy sciences in order to mitigate the destabilizing socio-economic impacts of climate change.
"Pale Blue Dot" Excerpts:
Video: Viruses are just some of the threats we have to be concerned about now as we move into the future. Here are a few more, including climate change, economic decline, and more.
We address our problems of Population Growth, Economic Decline, and Climate Change with: Large Scale Investments in Sustainable Infrastructure Projects for:
- Food
- Water
- Energy
- Information
Climate Change
After seeing that photo, Sagan Wrote a Passage Titled
"A Pale Blue Dot."
- Those Three Big Challenges shape our Socio-Economic structures and they are so significant that large enough imbalances will disrupt our global stability and security - which is why they are the "Big" Three. But, we also need to keep in mind other significant threats, such as: cyber threats, terrorism, war, cancer, disease, Alzheimers, and more.
"To me, [this picture] underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Let's Think as Big as We Can:
Below is a real picture of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away.
- Over the past 50 years, our country has become a "debt based" economy, where our finance systems extract wealth from the working class, and this pattern has now brought debt and wealth inequality to unstable levels, here and around the world. Factors such as the convergence of automation and population growth will further destabilize our economic system.
To Think Big - we first have to realize how small we really are:
- Climate Change will cause unpredictable weather patterns that will threaten our resource security, particularly for food and water; and it will cause global population displacement of millions of people from coastal areas and cities towards less affected regions.
Other peripheral threats
The time for
thinking small is over.
My concept of Think Big, Get Serious comes from acknowledging this reality that we are spinning through the Universe - and we are just holding on, fighting for our survival - together.
Economic Decline
Just Watch, "A Pale Blue Dot" (Below) and you'll understand what I mean by "Think Big"
Quick 60 Second Video Explaining Our Problems
- In the next 30 years, our global population will increase by over 1 billion people (reaching over 9 billion people), and our state can expect a population increase by 500k to 1 million people. This growth will increase demands on all resources across the global; and in MA it will increase congestion and further stress our aging infrastructure.
To respond to Economic Decline:
We need to create broad economic growth with investments in science and infrastructure, particularly FWEI systems. Those investment will create jobs, create opportunity, produce things that help people, and create a stronger, more stable economy based on resource production, not unstable fiat money and extracting wealth from the middle-class.
In that passage, he puts life in a universal perspective, and highlights our need to help each other.
That theme is exactly what I mean by:
Think Big. Get Serious.
Mendez For State Senate
Population Growth
In this video I breakdown what I mean by: "Invest in Sustainable Infrastructure Systems for Food, Water, Energy, and Information.