Close Relatives of Deep Mysteries

The Martian surface as viewed by The Mars Curiosity Rover, 2014 (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

The people of our time are fascinated by the thought of life, especially intelligent life, existing elsewhere in the universe, and we have naturally devoted a considerable amount of effort into looking for traces of it in interstellar radio signals and Martian soils, but it wasn't all that long ago that we had a comparable mystery right here on Earth. Before we became a seafaring species, our ancestors could only look out from impassable shorelines and likewise wonder what mysteries lay beyond. Minds left to wonder about this imagined great sea monsters, cities of gold, and advanced civilizations on lost continents. How they would envy us for living at a time when we know in fantastic detail about what really lies on the other side of those oceans, and how surprised they would be to learn that we're not walking around in constant amazement about what we've discovered.

We may view the great period of naval exploration with some passing historical interest today, but we mostly take it for granted. Perhaps then, even a discovery as enormous as alien life would have the same fate, only raising a shrug from future students once it too became something people learned about from dusty old history books, or whatever future equivalents there might be of history books and dust.

Buying locally, but not in winter and not if it requires driving to more stores

We've all heard that buying locally-grown produce is better for the environment because of the fuel consumed to transport goods, but that isn't always the case. If you can buy locally-grown tomatoes in the middle of winter, it's likely because they've been grown in heated greenhouses over several weeks, which is far worse in terms of carbon emissions than buying tomatoes that have been transported from another country where they were grown without artificial heating. Indeed, the environmental impact of transportation is typically a drop in the ocean compared to the many different resources that go into producing our food. These resources will include the energy consumed to make it possible to grow crops in areas and seasons that are colder or drier than where they naturally grow, but also processing of food into more complex products like chocolate bars and ready-meals. As a general rule, the more processing involved, the more energy required, and this is a far more important factor to attend to in the supermarket aisle than whether something is produced locally.

The Extinction of Thoughtful People and Fearless Parrots

Around five percent of all the people who have ever lived are still alive. That's an astoundingly high proportion given that modern homo sapiens have been around for upwards of 150,000 years, and it speaks to just how steeply the world's population has increased within living memory.

This increase, along with the technological advances that made it possible, have fundamentally transformed our planet in a way that has obviously taken an enormous toll. We've cleared away habitats to make way for our agriculture, practically emptied the sea of fish, and begun to change our climate, but the pace of all this has been just slow enough for each new generation to grow up thinking it's always been this way, that our use of natural resources is normal so we can go on like this forever. But we clearly can't. The reality we are now living with, and have apparently been living with for the last century, is that the Earth is experiencing a mass extinction event on a scale not unlike the one that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last century, vertebrate species have been disappearing at a pace that is conservatively estimated to be 114 times the background rate.