Longer Step: Ideas for Justice and Sustainability

 The Guardian, a really good news source, published this great article about the effects of Covid. The wealthy sometimes have access to well-filtered air when living indoors, such as electrostatic filters installed in Parliament. Private schools and airlines also have great air filtering. But public schools and many other places don't, and Covid spreads easily as a result. There is evidence that multiple cases of Covid, even mild ones, leads to permanent damage to vital organs. So, by our not all getting the latest vaccines, by not masking indoors in public, we are helping to spread multiple cases of Covid to people.  Few people are wearing masks, indoors in public, now. The only way to view this is to admit that most of us just don't care if we kill or maim others, if we help create worse new Covid variants, or if we get sick ourselves. Are we that selfish and uncaring, even about our own health? 

 It's fun to estimate the number of planets in our galaxy that are similar to Earth. It might be millions. But this article states that, truly, there is no "Planet B." Not Mars, and not any other nearby star's planet. At our current spaceship speed it would take 79,000 years to reach the Alpha Centauri system, which is nearest to us if not counting our sun. And it is almost a zero chance that there is a planet there ready for us to live on. It might be habitable, just not habitable to us. Even the Earth has only been habitable to humans for an eyeblink of the total time of Earth's existence. Bottom line: We need to drop everything else and make it our first priority to save this planet, our only home. There is no Planet B.