Time to think outside the box

The sun is just a star we are told and one of millions in this galaxy. It brings light and heat and hope to a self aware organism living on a small rock around its orbit. A nuclear reactor, a yellow orb, a golden disc, for this we pay homage and worship you. We have no grasp of true time, only that brief moment in which we exist, that passes, to really see the world we need four dimensional glasses. Scrape away the layers where decaying matter once felt the sun’s warmth.

In the far past the earth was a vast ice sheet, one large snowball. Then the tropics and then the desserts, waning and waxing like the moon. The flip side is that humans have existed at a relatively un-chaotic temperate time in the solar life cycle. We have enjoyed a cereal bowl existence, not too hot, not too cold for quite a while. We are relaxed, a tornado or lightning strike happens somewhere else to somebody else, leaving us with the preoccupation of earning money and the desire of love.

Global climatic concerns are too much for most people, with their heads down in Fifty Shades or planning their next meal, no imagination at all. To imagine is to travel beyond the scope of the ordinary, the humdrum, the banal, the suburban. The same stuff holding the sun together is the same stuff keeping our feet on the ground. Matter and energy in a concrete mixer, as our small fragile world travels through space and time.

It is fragile, astronauts know this.