Can you unshackle your imagination and let it run free…like a child of six or seven?

Free enough to   s-t-r-e-t-c-h and e-x-p-a-n-d your mind into a new reality?

If you can, you will realize that we actually are on a—magnificently—marvelously—magically—and many say mystically—designed spaceship!  It’s called…SPACESHIP EARTH (SSE). 

Will your ego allow you to believe our lives are really being played out as infinitesimally short micro-blips on the Spaceship’s time computer?  If the answer is yes, you will find it wonderfully strange and exciting.  You’ll find that we’re not living on just plain, old, comfortable Mother Earth.

Our ship is on a steady course into deep outer space and it is our home for a very—very—very short time—just one human life span. Its propulsion is the result of the movement of our solar system within our galaxy.  All of this started with the Big Bang* 13.7 billion years ago, or by Instant Creation thousands of years ago, according to your beliefs.

SSE’s DESIGNER included many wonderful and ingenious elements in the ship for its journey.  The first and most intriguing is the Ship’s abundance of water, which is essential for all life as we know it.  The Ship was carefully positioned in our solar system with reference to our total energy source, the sun—not too close (where all the water would evaporate) and not too far away (where all the water would freeze).  Another element of critical importance is that SSE is, like all spaceships, designed so that it is completely self-contained.  SSE can miraculously make fully automatic repairs to all of its millions of perpetual systems while in flight.

* For simplicity, we will ignore other more recent theories.     “13.7”? – The World  Almanac as of  2008, page 226!.

Being self-contained means that nothing new enters the Ship except sunlight and a few random meteorites or asteroids, and nothing leaves it except hydrogen, other gases, and some human-made rockets and debris.  On Spaceship Earth practically everything remains aboard forever in one form or another including ourselves and our remains.  It is as if we exist in an imaginary room with no furnishings, windows, or doors.  Not one thing can be “disposable” or thrown away.  All we can do is move things from one corner to another corner in the self-contained room.  Being self-contained also means that for thousands of years our spaceship has been meticulously fine-tuning itself for our flight.  Every ant, spider, butterfly, field mouse, eagle, mountain guerrilla, elephant, whale, patch of moss, tree, stream, lake, and blade of grass are accounted for—or they wouldn’t be here—and each is a part of one of SSE’s delicate, continuously recycling Operating & Maintenance (O&M) Systems outlined in Chapter 2

Caterpillar stage of the EUROPEAN SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY.

You will enjoy its “other” life when you reach page XXII.

Our Ship is set on automatic pilot, and its millions of systems don’t need managing.  All we have to do is keep our hands off—stand clear—and let the systems do their millions of jobs.

Unfortunately, like uneducated, poorly trained or spoiled children, we have been thoughtlessly  reproducing and carelessly polluting, contaminating, and even devastating (p/c/d) the air and almost every field, mountain, wooded area, river, beach, and ocean of the Ship.  This behavior is the cause of all of the very serious damage we have done—and are doing—to SSE’s vital life-giving systems.

To continue our voyage as originally planned, we will have to immediately start to change our current values, conveniences-driven lifestyles and habits, and allow the Ship to begin to make her automatic repairs to all of the areas we have damaged or destroyed.

SSE is really a magnificent, intricate, ingeniously designed, CELESTIAL MACHINE! 

We should  respect every intricate part of it.

XIV