While we sit in our climate-controlled homes, defying the elements that shortened the lives of so many human predecessors, we easily forget how grim reality once was; so many of us are unaware of our scavenging past—a past littered with vampiric eating habits and tools for extracting bone marrow like a tribe of bipedal vultures. We have achieved, or glimpsed the path toward, nearly everything we could imagine in our dreams and fictions; we achieved through our tool use.
Today economies are struggling, our one-planet world is overpopulated, and Earth is proving unable to bear our current course. Instead of looking at our glorious evolution from mere hominid apes to the greatest living, sentient, organism on Earth, we regress, and we build houses in trees in front of our City Halls in protest of our own lack of vision.
Do not occupy your towns; do not occupy your city halls; do not occupy Wall Street; do not occupy Oakland; do not occupy Spain; do not claim to occupy a planet filled end-to-end with our teeming presence. We have occupied the Earth; that is our problem.
The greatest achievements of human civilization have been born of an intrinsic desire to explore and seek out the truth in the unknown; from the earliest philosophers to the physicists, biologists, and astronomers of today, we have been explorers of truth. Before we were explorers of truth, we were explorers of the Earth.
To our primitive ancestors, continents separated by seas may well have been planets unto themselves, and, through persistence and an evolved, tool-centric, mind, we developed methods for overcoming obstacles, like transporting sufficient food and water, to make a ship a travelling island unto itself. Physical exploration has always pushed the boundaries of mental exploration; the farther we go and the further we look, the greater our advancement and the more impressive the truths we discover.
The world is an amazing place, to be sure, and yet so many are inclined to believe it is all we are destined to have and inhabit; the universe is an even more amazing place. The human world exists anywhere humans are; home is where the human heart beats—even where it yearns to beat. Why suffice to call Earth our world?
Occupy Mars—not next century, but today.
Occupy Mars for your, and your children’s, future; Occupy Mars for your own financial security; Occupy Mars to save the Earth; Occupy Mars to unite the world under one peaceful cause; most important of all: Occupy Mars to push the limits of the human capacity for both social and technological advancement.
