It seems like a really big place sometimes doesn’t it, the world?  Things happen thousands of miles away and they don’t seem quite relevant to you.  We have jet planes and mega sea liners, we have sub-space rockets and people who run marathons day after day after day, but if you want to visit a distant aunty on the other side of the globe, it still represents a bit of a trek.  This little blue dot of ours is not even the biggest planet in our tiny solar system: only Mercury, Venus and Mars are smaller.  The outer gas giants are vastly bigger – although not necessarily somewhere you would want to site a patio.  In an infinite space the Earth takes up less room than Donald Trump’s brain takes in his head (which, like the universe, is ever-expanding) yet it is all we’ve got.

Astronomers spend years searching for earth-like planets that may be similarly inhabitable (unless I’ve got that wrong and they’re the ones that tell you that if you were born under the sign of the goat you might well meet a tall dark stranger who will spin you a tale and empty your bank account on Thursday) but they are light years away and there are no trains after six.  As a species we will almost certainly be extinct before we reach them.  So where do we go when we’ve buggered this little orb?

Mercury and Venus are definitely too hot for most Brits, even when they’ve got their straw panama’s, and Mars, although reachable, is only half the size of Earth so we’re not all going to fit there.  It also has only about a third of our gravity so, although it would be good for our BMI, we would have to nail the furniture down and, like Croydon, it has no atmosphere to mention.  At minus 60°C it is also colder than the average politician’s heart.  I read long ago, that if we built giant CFC plants on the surface of the planet it would lead to global warming that would release the water held in its soil.  If we then filled the planet with trees – this is quite a long-term project – they would suck up the CO2 and bash out enough oxygen to form a breathable atmosphere (once we’d turned the CFC’s off).  The trees would also cause precipitation and thus rivers and oceans and, Bob’s your uncle, in no time we’d have another habitable planet to f*ck up.  Call me pessimistic, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime.

Somehow we have to find a way to save this planet and, it seems to me, the biggest obstacle to that is that we have to agree that we all have a place in it.  There is little incentive to make it a better place in which to live, if the immediate plan is to exterminate half of the people who live here.  Perhaps we’d have more respect for one another if there weren’t so many of us.  Unless we have plans to use Mars as some kind of allotment – a celestial veg-patch – we have to accept that birth control is necessary. To my uneducated mind, having fewer people would lessen every single one of the world’s myriad problems (except the one that steams up your glasses when you come in from the cold).

Initially this little post was going to be called ‘All You Need Is Love’ but it just seemed too much of a stretch.  Love is, without question, the answer, but there is nothing like enough to go round, is there?  We cannot love our neighbours, so what are the chances of us loving the couple across the street, the folk from another town, the weirdoes from another country, the oddballs with another language, the morons with a different religion, anyone who wants what we have already got?  We have to learn to celebrate difference instead of fighting it.  Until we do that, until we make peace with one another, what are our chances of making peace with everything else?  If we don’t find a way, then the day when we do have to spread out to Mars and beyond will come very soon.  From our one little world we will seep out into the Universe – and God help it all…

Some of us live like princess
Some of us live like Queens
Most of us live just like me
And don’t know what it means
To take our place in one world
To make our peace in one world
To make our way in one world
To have our say in one world…  One World – John Martyn