Issue #44, February 9, 2007

Sun Warming

Let’s Pack Up Our Stuff, Get Off The Planet & Beat It Out to Mars

By Dan Rattiner

If you want to learn more about human nature, just consider how this species of ours might react if we found out that global warming was an interplanetary phenomenon.

Temperatures are rising. We think, at first, it’s us. Then we discover that temperatures are rising on all the planets in the solar system. It’s the sun. Something is going on with it and it’s heating up.

We’d spring into action. To halt this catastrophe, we’d be banging on the door of the United Nations to get a migration underway to the next planet further out, Mars, as soon as possible.

We could do it, we’d tell them. We’ll drop everything. Let’s go. And so, in the next five or ten years, we’d send hundreds of rockets to Mars to get the planet ready. We’d design and build long range space ships, commercial and government space stations, we’d sell space ship tickets, hold lotteries, begin to catalogue the animals to see which ones could stand the heat and could stay behind and which ones we’d have to take with us.

Teams of scientists would be working on what might be fired off at the sun to get it to cool back down. There would be theories. Things would be fired at the sun on an almost daily basis to see if they’d work. There would be religious zealots rounding people up to pray for our sins, to re-read the story of Noah and to praise the Lord.

Other scientists would calculate how soon Mercury and Venus might catch fire, and what that might mean as far as Earth and its orbit was concerned, or, more importantly, Mars, and how quickly Mars could get an atmosphere and whether the melting and subsequent disappearance of Pluto into a fine mist might impact the rest of the solar system and the empty space all around it.

Of course, in the case of global warming, where it is just our fault, and it is we who are heating up the atmosphere that surrounds the planet, it’s a different story.

You mean all this is being caused by the industrial society that has been pumping out carbon pollutants for the past hundred years, and to end it we will have to end that practice?

To paraphrase Clark Gable, frankly, dear, we don’t give a damn. We’re driving the Hummer to Aunt Tillie’s for the holidays. Somebody else will have to figure this out.