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.

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.