hate it

I hate this quote that shows up on the bottom of the page:

"On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers, only crew."

— Marshall McLuhan

That's crap!Yeah, I understand what it means. For a minute I thought, 'how clever'. But then I actually thought about it.

The problem with calling the Earth a spaceship is that it implies we are somehow controlling it, and indeed, are a necessary addition to the Earth. This is unforgivably wrong.

We aren't necessary, we were never 'meant' to be here, and we aren't 'operating' the planet. If we were, it is arguable that our prospects would look a little bit brighter, but they don't. It is, very simply, an arrogant statement.

If the whole of humanity(and all of what we observe as life) vanished, or aborted itself, the Earth would continue to hurtle through space indifferently until the Sun engulfs it when it becomes a red giant. We are temporary. We are, for lack of a better phrase, an accident. We are fleeting, just as life is. Life is just the end product of the slow accumulation of matter over the course of 13 billion years. The reason why this is important to grasp is that it gives us a sense of objectivity to stay alive, knowing full well we potentially(and very likely) could NOT be alive.

Assuming that we are somehow important or meaningful, or perhaps that the universe(with all of it's indifference) has inherent purpose, is the sort of irrational nonsense that leads to wars, greed, suffering, and religion. Making the assumption that we are important makes us lazy in our struggle to better ourselves.

If we're already important, what's the point in making things better?