10 Tips For Coping With Mental Health Conditions In 2018

With the enviable position of having a cocktail of three mental health conditions: Autism, General Anxiety Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, it's come to my attention that trying to cope with mental health conditions with the state of the planet as it currently is is very, very, very difficult. I've seen a few guides on how to cope on the Internet but not a lot and not a lot of them included all the things that have helped me cope with the current state of our world, so I thought I'd regurgitate things that have helped me specifically in the hope that I can help other people going through the same experience. Also, disclaimer, I am in no way a trained professional and my life is by no means perfect so take this advice as... someone's advice. So, in no particular order:

1 - Explore Nature:

Humans, collectively, are idiots. Groups and individuals of them are fantastic, but if we look at the bigger picture, we're not doing particularly well at the moment. Animals, on the other hand, just do their thing. They're just carrying out their natural behaviours, being super chill, looking pretty, smelling nice and generally just being lovely to watch and be around. Animals are good. Find animals and be with them. Find trees and sit under them. Nature is just fabulous, it really is.

2 - Filter Your Inputs:

With things being as interesting as they are, the news can be a constant bombardment of everything awful in the world. If you're going to get anything done without breaking down under the weight of awfulness you'll have to filter said news. Get trending off of your Facebook and Twitter, you can open Facebook up in the message tab on the computer so you don't see it, look at it on your phone or get a browser extension. With Twitter you can do the same things except for the message tab or you could get TweetDeck, which I highly recommend (you will have to copy and paste emojis though). Follow people that make you feel happy, don't follow those that make you feel bad. Mute words, phrases and accounts that trigger your anxiety. If you have to check the news, try and check it as little as possible, once a day I find's best if you feel a need to check, and check it from matter-of-fact sources, not those that are going to sensationalise topics in order to get views. I mainly find that you'll overhear or someone will tell you big news anyway. I also find watching satirical shows about the news is a good idea, so you can kind of offset your outrage/fear/sadness with laughter. Shows like Have I Got News For You, Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver are all great for this.

3 - Use Self-Help Tools:

There is an absolute tonne of stuff out there to help people with mental health conditions. There are charities, books, websites, podcasts, vlogs, the list is endless. Ones that have helped me are this website that basically gives you Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for free (which is great because the waiting times are ages, although this is NOT to be used as a substitute for actual treatment if actual treatment is available), Headspace - guided meditations (although you do have to pay for most of it, but it is worth it if you have the cash), the podcast Anxiety Slayer and the book How To Survive the End of the World (When It's In Your Own Head) by Aaron Gillies (@TechnicallyRon on Twitter) which I cannot praise enough.

4 - Shift Your Focus:

When your brain is sending you a lot of worrisome thoughts, the best thing you can do is accept that they exist, pause and then shift your attention to something else: what you're doing, what you can see, hear, touch, smell. It can help people to set up worry times or rationalise their irrational thoughts but I find a lot of the time that just shifting the focus helps. It's important, though, that you accept the thought and pause first because if you just stop it and skip to something else, trying to get rid of it, then that reinforces the worrying behaviour in the first place... or so scientists or whatever say. Thoughts are like clouds, they come and go. Sure you can think some thoughts yourself but a lot are just your brain being random.

5 - Take Action:

If you're not happy with the state of the world, act. Things only change if people change them, so join a group that fits your ideals, contact your representatives, sign petitions, march, and, yes I'm gonna say it, even tweet about it. Tweeting at least brings attention to a subject, even those that are adamant that signing petitions and tweeting can't save the world have to accept that. So do something. It may not change anything, it may change everything, at least you can say to yourself that you did all you could to stop whatever you vehemently disagree with from happening. As Ghandi once said: "Be the change you wish to see in this world."

6 - Communicate with Humans:

Yes, humans are awful, but some aren't and those are your friends and family (that you like). Talk to them, even if only through text. They can help you through difficult times, give you a fresh perspective on things and, most importantly, just make you laugh and be happy.

7 - Do Things You Enjoy:

Pretty much what it says on the tin for this one. Not much more to say really. Have fun!

8 - Stay in the Present:

This one's from the school of Mindfulness (as well as shifting your focus actually), which is supposed to be really good for mental health according to people that know things. It makes sense really. You can't change the past, you can only do so much about the future and if you don't pay attention to the present that you won't have really done any living. We've only got so much time you know.

9 - Consider the Universe:

This is a subjective one (the effect not the fact), but the universe is big. Stupid big. Look up how big it is. For me knowing how cosmically insignificant everything is is a great source of comfort, for others it makes them feel useless, but to those I say we are significant as long as we have friends and family, as long as human civilisation exists. But if our worst fears were realised the stars would keep burning, Saturn would still be enveloped by its ring, Jupiter's Spot would keep swirling (for a while at least). And think of how big the universe is, think of all the civilisations that could be out there, all the life, all the strange worlds. We live on a small pale blue dot, the universe will continue after we are gone in all its strange, wonderful ways.

10 - See the Positives:

Mr Rogers said his mother would tell him after disasters, "Look for the helpers". There's a hell of a lot of negativity in the world, but there's also a hell of a lot of positivity. Look at the Good News Network, if you're on Reddit check out r/UpliftingNews, even if you can't find anything good consider that you are alive in an age where we know our position in the universe, we understand our beginnings, we can help treat mental health conditions, we're connected with people all around the world, we can access all the information the world can offer going back thousands and thousands of years without even leaving our bed. If you think about it, we're very lucky. Our atoms could have been anything: a rock, a fish, a lampost but we're a sentient human being who's alive at a point when they can fully understand the sheer magnitude of their universe. I think that's pretty cool.

I hope these tips help you in some way and I wish you the best of luck.

Ark Park PSVR Review

Yes, yes it's a cliche, but ever since I was little I've wanted to see real-life dinosaurs.

Born in the mid-90s, I was blessed with being exposed to a golden age of dinosaur presence in pop culture. I digested more dinosaur books than my tiny brain could comprehend, my eyes were glued to the screen watching Walking With Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park. I was obsessed with watching my Jurassic Park boxset over and over again. Fascinated with how special effects groups reproduced these extinct lifeforms I'd pour over behind the scenes featurettes of Jurassic Park and Walking With Dinosaurs. It was the Walking With Dinosaurs specials with Nigel Marven, however, that really fuelled my passion at a young age. I'd use to pack a little dinosaur-themed backpack and trek off to the local museum pretending that I was Nigel Marven studying for a trip back in time and walk around my living room pretending to fend off a herd of Protoceratops and hide from a Tarbosaurus. Throughout my life I have taken every given opportunity to "walk with dinosaurs", from going to dinosaur adventure parks to going to live experiences like Dinosaurs in the Wild.

So when this came out it was really a no-brainer.

A kid's dream come true.

I looked through the reviews and I looked at the price, and logically, being in the financial situation I am, it was a mad idea but... I could walk with dinosaurs whenever I wanted! The man-child I am couldn't resist.

What does Ark Park have that this doesn't?

So onto reviewing the game. Now I'm taking this review from the standpoint of the price. The game is horrendously priced. It's currently a whopping £44.99 on the PlayStation store. So, coming from this angle, we best get our money's worth. To be fair, I am who that lawyer dude in Jurassic Park was talking about when he said they could charge any price for people to see dinosaurs and they would come but for how high the price is I really have to address the content and worth of the game in this review. Let's have a gander at a comparable game on the PlayStation store and see how much that is. So going from a completely "ooh ahh, looking at dinosaurs" perspective, you can get Time Machine VR for £23.99, which begs the question, what does Ark Park have that this game doesn't?

"Must go faster!" There's definitely a Jurassic influence in this game.

Let's look at the features then. The game is built around a theme park built on some random planet that comprises of several islands full of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures. Now to say that it doesn't resemble Jurassic World would be a lie. You can clearly see the influence from the monorail ride in over the water, confronted by a giant Mosasaur that backflips over the waves. The influence continues later in the game when you see a big gate, in fact I even said "What do you think they keep in there? King Kong?" to myself when I first saw it. There's even a cheeky "hold onto your butts" line thrown in by one of the guides, so the game definitely knows what its inspiration is. What you do in the game is wander around a handful of paths in this park, looking at prehistoric animals and gathering materials so you can craft weapons for the second part of the game, which is an optional wave shooter under the guise of the park going wrong (again you can see the Jurassic influence). You can also grow your own dinosaurs from eggs and ride them which is pretty cool, albeit riding them consists of a pre-determined cutscene that you have no control over.

Unlike the Maglev when you go into the park, locomotion is... difficult in the game.

It's not much more than Time Machine VR, where you go to prehistoric oceans and wander about in search for clues. Taking this into consideration, the justification for its nearly doubling in price must be the variety of content to offer and the gameplay mechanics? Well even though you can decide what you want to do, there are only a handful of tracks, and there are no places where you can really just chill with dinosaurs. They're all claustrophobic pathways with dinosaurs and other creatures wandering off the path as soon as you approach them. Don't get me wrong it's an absolutely fantastic experience and even though the scripting is repetitive and predictable it never gets old to be chased by a Giganotosaurus or sit in awe as you drive under a Sauropod, so despite its flaws I really do love this game. You can also try the wave shooter if you so desire but I'm not a violent person and there's a multiplayer option which I haven't tried yet, so you can do a lot but it doesn't completely lend itself to replayability, unless you love dinosaurs like me and don't mind if they're doing exactly the same thing as they did a few hours ago. To be fair, neither does Time Machine VR but everything in this game happens once and then happens exactly the same way every time afterwards, It's like being stuck in a time loop whenever you boot it up. How about the gameplay mechanics? Well it's not great there either. There's no fluid locomotion option and you have to look where you want to go and then turn the motion controller in the direction you want to face (if you're using Move), which I never really bother with as it's a faff. You can turn around in 30-degree sections using the circle button instead on either controller to go left or right respectively but the sudden movement is quite jarring and you never really get the precision you want when you want to, say, look at a crafting menu in a precise direction.

I'm doing it, I'm banging the "feathered" stick again.

It must also be noted that Time Machine VR strived for an educational experience and, while there are educational aspects to this game, it doesn't display a perfect representation of dinosaurs according to the current findings of palaeontology. Theropods, for example, aren't feathered, just having a few quills here or there and the Giganotosaurus was actually called a "Gigantosaurus" by the tour guide.

The final verdict, then. Ark Park is fantastic. It's a revelation in modern technology. If you could tell 10 year-old me that in the future he could ride a Triceratops whenever he wanted and chill out with Dodos in his own living room he'd go ballistic, but for what Ark Park is offering the price doesn't match in my opinion. Maybe it's because I'm low on money and maybe it's because the game had a lot of delays in coming out so a lot of hype was built but it just feels like it's promoting itself above its weight. If the game added some better gameplay mechanics and areas where you can just sit and watch dinosaurs in large open spaces then it'd easily bump itself up a couple of marks, but as it is now it looks like some expense has been spared.

I give it a 6/10.

Hope

Today our world faces many challenges. Over the past year, rising tensions between countries has meant that nuclear war has begun to creep back into the minds of our collective societies as we again perilously tip-toe on the edge of the metaphoric tightrope. Climate change has also established itself in our minds with a passion, with plastic being found in vast clouds in our oceans and freak weather occurrences becoming ever more and more frequent. These and other contributing factors lead the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently move the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. The closest we've ever symbolically been to our own destruction since the Doomsday Clock was invented in the height of the Cold War.

But there is hope.

Today two American Astronauts and one Russian Cosmonaut are being launched to the International Space Station. Ricky Arnold, Drew Feustel and Oleg Artemyev will launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at 17:44 UTC onboard a Russian Soyuz MS-08 rocket, becoming a part of the Expedition 55/56 crew on the International Space Station currently orbiting Earth. They'll arrive at the station two days later on Friday after they've matched their orbit to meet it.

(R-L) Feustel, Artemyev and Arnold. Credit NASA/Victor Zelentsov

It's safe to say that America and Russia don't particularly see eye-to-eye on things at the moment but here they are working together to advance the well-being of all humans here on Earth.

Earlier this year the company Rocket Lab launched a satellite called the Humanity Star into orbit. Basically a big mirror, the concept was to make humans look up and realise how small they are, how they need to work together to preserve their planet, their cultures and indeed their lives and to provide hope for the future. The satellite is degrading from its orbit quicker than expected but I don't think it needed to be launched anyway because all humans need to do to consider those points, to feel those emotions, is to look up when the International Space Station is flying overhead. There people from countries who don't agree on everything work together for the benefit of humanity, they trust each other with their lives, they reach out into the great unknown of space together as colleagues and as friends.

If humans and this wonderful blue and green planet are going to survive we need to take more inspiration from our orbiting beacon of hope.

Look up.

Applying to be an Astronaut - Space for Humanity

I've entered a fair few competitions in my life and I've never won any of them until last year when I won NASA's Message To Voyager competition to get a message sent into space on behalf of humanity, which isn't a bad one to win! Winning that competition gave me a lot of confidence and taught me that I could achieve anything. It was an honour to be chosen first for the shortlist by NASA and then to win by the public. It was amazing to be supported by the National Autistic Society here in the UK and fantastic to show what people with Asperger's and Autism can achieve.

So when I stumbled across this opportunity from Space for Humanity, to actually become an astronaut, my life's dream, well I had to enter.

With my dyspraxia, asthma and lack of ability in the maths department I could never actually be an astronaut with a space agency and finding myself in financial difficulty at the moment (and if I hadn't) I'd never be able to afford a ticket on a space tourism flight.

I'd love to become an astronaut not only for personal reasons but also as I have Asperger's Syndrome I'd be be one of the first Autistic people to be an Astronaut, raising awareness for the Autistic community and I'd also love to communicate with the general public what astronauts call the "overview effect", the effect of seeing the Earth from Space, showing us all how precious and fragile our "pale blue dot" is and how it must be cared for, which is very prescient in modern times.

You can check out my application video below. If you can, please give it a like and share it and this blog post to others. Who knows, maybe the sky isn't the limit!

Ad Astra.

International Women's Day: My Women Idols

As today is International Women's Day, I thought I'd do a run-down of the women that are my idols in life, both real and fictional, in no particular order.

Real

My Mother

By a country mile my biggest idol, my mother has had arthritis since she was 2 years old. Dealing with the difficulty of arthritis and the prejudice of others at a time when arthritis was thought to only occur in older people, she went on to become a maths teacher. After that she has contracted a cocktail of other disabilities including diabetes, depression, kidney disease, anaemia, basically pretty much everything under the sun. She lives in severe pain every day, her feet hurt her when she walks but she refuses to use a wheelchair. On top of this she's had to fight for help for me because of my Asperger's and other conditions for 21 years and continues to do so. The world keeps knocking her down but she keeps getting back up every time. She is by far the most resilient human being I've ever known or heard of. She's the closest thing that exists to a superhero.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall is a primatologist and anthropologist best known as one of the world's foremost experts on chimpanzees having studied them for over 50 years. She's also a passionate environmental activist and was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002.

Sylvia Earle

Sylvia Earle is a marine biologist and was the female chief scientist of the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She's also an environmental activist, dedicated to saving the ocean with the group Ocean Elders.

Saba Douglas Hamilton

Saba Douglas Hamilton is a wildlife conservationist who has worked for various conservation charities. She is also well-known as a wildlife presenter and is the current manager of Elephant Watch Camp in Kenya and the Special Projects Director for the charity Save The Elephants.

Susie Wolff

Susie Wolff is a former racing driver who was signed by Williams F1 team in 2012 as a development driver. In 2014 she was the first woman racing driver to take part in an F1 race weekend in 22 years.

Sabine Schmitz

Sabine Schmitz is a professional racing driver. She has won the VLN Endurance Racing Championship and the 24 Hours Nürburgring. She has driven the BMW Ring Taxi around the track and is so experienced with the track that she is known as Queen of the Nürburgring.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist, most well-known for refusing to give up her "coloured" bus seat for a white woman when the "whites" section was full, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott in defiance of segregation on buses.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was a writer, poet and civil rights activist, well-known for her poetry works and steadfast convictions.

Beatrice Fihn

Beatrice Fihn is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons, who were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize last year for being instrumental in co-ordinating the United Nations Nuclear Ban Treaty which was also ratified last year.

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is an artist and peace activist. Well-known for being the spouse of John Lennon she continues to be a prominent peace activist in the present day.

Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole was a businesswoman and nurse who decided to set up her own hotel to help soldiers during the Crimean War after the War Office told her she couldn't serve as a nurse.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the British suffragette movement which eventually helped women win the right to vote in the country.

Emily Davison

Emily Davison was part of the British suffragette movement, being arrested and force-fed several times. She eventually made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause by throwing herself in front of the King's horse during a horse race, bringing attention to the movement.

Taylor Richardson

Taylor Richardson is high-school student aspiring to be an astronaut. She's an activist and advocate for the black community in STEM subjects, raising money to pay for children to see A Wrinkle In Time and Hidden Figures.

Mae Jemison

Mae Jemison is a NASA astronaut as well as an engineer and physician. She is most well-known as being the first African-American woman to go to space. She also appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation afterwards (which is pretty damn cool having gone to space and then gone to fake space I just wanted to include that).

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson is a mathematician, most well-known for calculating for NASA from the earliest missions to the Space Shuttle era.

Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist and space engineer who worked for NASA developing the on-board flight software for the Apollo Moon missions.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who had to hide from the Nazis in order to not be sent to a concentration camp and killed. She was unfortunately found and killed but while hiding she wrote a diary for she is now famous. Her optimism and courage in spite of such a bleak existence is inspiring beyond words.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science, an animal behaviour consultant to the livestock industry and an autism spokesperson. She was one of the first people with autism to publicly share her personal experiences and even invented a device to help people with autism.

Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher is most well-known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise but what I most admire about her the nonchalant attitude she had towards the opinions of others and the work she did to help people better understand mental health conditions.

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was a French soldier known for her swift victories against the English. When she was captured and trialled to be burnt at the stake, where her resolve and expert responses to the questions of her accusers own her idol status for me. She was steadfast to the end.

Ann Druyan

Ann Druyan is the widow of the late Carl Sagan, who she co-wrote the first Cosmos series with. She created, produced and wrote the second Cosmos series in 2014. She was also the Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which overlooked the creation of the Golden Records that were fixed to the probes Voyager 1 and 2.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I have an awful memory and the best part about writing this article was that I kept coming up with more and more idols during the process. Women are phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal and it's about time we treat them as equal to men in every regard.

Information from Wikipedia, images various.

The Reality of a PIP Interview

The alarm wakes me with a start. We've not been killed then. I roll out of bed, drowsy from lack of sleep. Today's the day they decide if I deserve to have money to live. It would have been earlier but we changed it after they scheduled it for the day of my 21st birthday.

We gather my things: a fidget cube, a cuddly toy, a walking stick and a three-wheeled stroller. I don't bother washing my hair or brushing my teeth. I'm too anxious to do even the most basic things. As soon as I engage in anything remotely menial my mind wonders to terrible places. 

Bundling into the car I'm wary of the journey ahead. It's a long journey, especially for someone who's in an active battle with his own mind and shouldn't really be left alone with it. We pass a power plant on the way. I note that it could be a target in a nuclear attack. Visions of mushroom clouds, vaporisation and radiation sickness proceed. My heart beats faster, the fear returns again.

We arrive at the destination and get the things out the car. I hobble down the street with my walking stick, not being able to walk very far without using one due to my dyspraxia. Rain pours down from above, hammering onto my now-greasy coat hood. We're in a city. The nuclear nightmares begin again.

Eventually we find the evaluation centre, locked away in an alcove of office buildings. I walk in with the stroller, having switched to it from the walking stick due to its better efficiency. We sit down and wait.

I'm called in. My Mother comes in with me because I'm so anxious all the time that I can't remember anything. The woman interviewing me sits behind a desk in an unusually spacious office. She greets me with a smile and says something about how she's here to help understand my conditions. Then the interrogation begins.

She reads what I have: Asperger's, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, Dyspraxia. She reads the doctor's note saying how I'm so limited by these conditions that I can barely do menial tasks. Her attention turns to me. I'm in mid-swing of my nuclear fears, furiously clicking away on my fidget cube to try and make the thoughts go away. She asks me various questions, A lot of them I can't remember the answers to so Mum fills in the gaps, she doesn't want to hear from Mum she says, she wants to hear from me.

"How far can you walk?"
"I don't know, I have to use the stick or a stroller. I can't walk for very long unaided."
"Can you walk X amount of metres?"

"I don't know what that is."
"Just down to the lampost at the end of the road and back."
So here I am, expected to judge a distance based on the geography of a city I'm not familiar with. Unsurprisingly I don't know the answer.

"You can walk that can't you?" 

The woman is now pre-empting my response.

"I guess, maybe with the stick or the stroller."

She writes something down on her pad.

"What do you do in the day?"
"I go on the computer, watch TV and films, play games, anything to distract me from my thoughts. I like space, I recently won a NASA competition where you had to send a message to be sent into space in."

More scribbling. More clicking on the fidget cube. 

"You went to a mainstream school didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Can you remember what grades you got at GCSE and A-Level?"
I struggle for a while and then recall my grades, mostly average, some towards the top end at GCSE.

"Can you cook unaided?"
"Well I can't really cook so-"
"Could you physically cook unaided?"
"Well I can't stand for long periods of time."
"But can you use kitchen utensils?"
I'm not safe with them because of anxiety, my mind wanders, I can't even perform menial tasks because of anxiety anyway.
After many questions like this, we turn to the physical stage of the interview.

"Could you stand please?"
The woman then proceeds to ask me to raise my leg as far as I can, scrutinising my movement and writing it down. I feel like a cow in a cattle grid.

We leave and I feel awful. The lowest of the low. A failure.

We wait for a while and a letter comes back through the door just before Christmas. There is nothing wrong with me. I attended a mainstream school (doesn't matter about the full support I received), I passed my driving test with a manual car so that means I can multitask (doesn't matter how long it took, how we can't afford a car let alone an automatic one or how I barely drive due to anxiety), my medication's working (this doesn't even warrant a response) and I won the NASA competition (literally something anyone who could write 60 characters could do). 

My PIP has been cancelled. 

My Mum's lost her Carer's Allowance, her carer component of ESA and her Severe Disabled Benefit (she has debilitating Arthritis and a host of other medical conditions) because of it. 

We've lost £270 a week, and that's not mentioning all the disability cards that got me money off things.

We are poor.

The Case for Survival

"We offer friendship across the stars. You are not alone."

That message is currently hurtling through space, it is estimated that the signal could last for the same distance as approximately one hundred solar systems, potentially lasting for hundreds of years.

I wrote that message, and I was lucky enough to be shortlisted by NASA for a public vote and to win that vote. I wrote that message as an olive branch in the unlikely scenario that alien life would come across it and manage to decrypt it. That message shows what humanity is capable of when we work together towards a common goal, it gives us a glimpse into a future of peaceful exploration of the solar system to try and discover who we are, why we're here, how we got here and what our place in the universe is.

The Message to Voyager competition, of which my message was a part, was launched with the same premise of the Golden Record, which was designed by the famous scientist Carl Sagan and his team to display various facets of human life in case aliens were to happen upon it. The Golden Record was attached to probes Voyager 1 and 2 when they were launched in the 70s.

At that time, the world was gripped in the middle of the Cold War, with two superpowers poised with their fingers above buttons ready to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. I was born in the 90s, after the Cold War ended, so I've never experienced the sheer terror of facing the reality of the world possibly ending at any moment but now, with increased tensions between America and North Korea and both leaders exchanging threats with each other, I have. Of course other problems such as climate change threaten our species but this threat has become real and immediate.

We all know what nuclear weapons would do to our planet. The devastation they'd cause, the untold misery, so I'll stick to reasons why we shouldn't kill off our species, I'm sure people know that too, but with such casual threats of apocalypse being banded around, I'd like to make sure.

We've been around a long time, roughly 200,000 years, and we've achieved a lot. We've created languages and art, we've created the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the San Francisco bridge, the Burj Khalifa. We've sailed to the farthest corners of our blue sphere, we've mined underground, we've worked out how to fly, we've even reached out into space and walked on the Moon. We've harbored brilliant poets, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, theologians, philosophers, teachers, vets, physicists. We've had our issues, we've been barbarous at times, but from that dark past we've formed close bonds between each other, we've reached out across thousands of miles to work together towards a common cause. Through the creation of the internet we know now more than ever that this planet is shared by all.

As far as we know we're the only life that exists, most probably the only complex lifeforms in our solar system at least. Earth is an oasis in an inhospitable vacuum, surrounded by satellites and planets of "magnificent desolation", we're unique, positioned the right distance away from the sun and under just the right variables to harbor life.

Think of all we've achieved as a species, think of all we could achieve in the future. Think of how unique we are in the solar system or even, as far as we know so far, in the universe. Think of every person on this planet who has hopes and dreams, wants and desires, think of the children.

We're a species worth saving, on a planet worth saving.