The Story So Far………………… (Part 1)
Once upon a time, many millions of years ago, in an insignificant galaxy on the far flung edges of the universe, a small planet was formed.
Known today by it’s inhabitants as Earth, (which is ironic as it is 75% water) by an incredible set of fortuitous circumstances this small planet was able to support life which slowly evolved into an amazing variety of species, from the smallest single cell organism to the majestic Blue Whale.
One of the fortuitous circumstances that enables this small planet to support this myriad of life forms is that it has an atmosphere that has 21% oxygen which is essential to life!
By far the most successful species to evolve on earth is Homo Sapiens commonly known as Humans or Mankind. Some of these humans believe that the planet and all life on it was made in 6 days by an all powerful Being called God/Jehova/Allah/Rainbow Serpent and the list goes on depending on where they live! But an observant fellow by the name of Charles Darwin figured that all species had evolved over the millenia to adapt to their environment and that takes a bit longer than 6 days! But I digress…
Because they have a relatively large brain, humans adapted and prospered and went from living in caves and hunting food to building their own collection of caves called cities and growing and even manufacturing their food. Along the way they went from trading goods and services to using an intermediary form of trade called Money. Soon the accumulation of Money and power became the object of trade and now 90% of the worlds wealth is owned and controlled by less than 10& of the worlds population thereby subjecting the vast majority of the worlds population to powerless poverty.
While Mankind was slowly figuring this all out, the planet Earth was was just doing it’s thing, which was to revolve,rotate and generally keep things in balance so all these species could survive. Along the way there was the odd Ice Age and warming event along with earthquakes, volcanoes,asteroids and the odd hurricane and Magnetic field shift just to spice things up a bit. This has been happening ever since the planet was formed which was a long, long time before Homo Sapiens appeared on the scene!
Ice Ages and Warming Events that happen over timescales of millenia which humans are just starting to fully understand but in their short sightedness they only just started to record some of these facts and so are constantly playing catch-up!
After 4-5,000 years of what humans like to call Civilisation, a man discovered that if you burnt stuff to boil water in a machine you could use steam to do work! Thus began the Industrial Revolution. Humans also dicovered that wood and more especially coal, gas and an even better substance called oil was plentiful and was really good for powering industry. Gleefully they made more machines and factories to make more stuff to sell and therefore made lot’s of money. As they were doing this they were were extracting resources that took millions of years to form and as a by-product of all this frenetic activity they were poisoning the environment and atmosphere of the Earth which is the only place within thousands of lightyears that will sustain life as humans know it!
Around 150 yrs after the start of the Industrial Revolution a group of people called Environmentalists began to point out that all this pollution of the waterways, oceans and the atmosphere was probably not too good for all the species that live on Earth and it was probably a good idea to try and do something about it before it was too late. This annoyed a lot of the Industrialists who now had to spend money on Clean-ups and abatement schemes but eventually most realised that it was in everybodies best interest if they complied or at least looked like they were complying.
In a rare show of collaboration Earth’s Governments got together to ban a group of chemicals called CFCs which had been proven to contribute to a large hole in the Ozone layer of the atmoshphere. This hole was letting in a lot of extra UV rays from the sun which was threatening to fry everybody in the Southern Hemisphere. Magically, the hole reverted to it’s normal size once those chemicals were banned!
And so to the present day……………
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