Okay – this is a Coaching website. However, there is more to say. What the hell, it is my blog…

Elon Musk is an interesting character. He caught my attention recently when he was talking about the idea of refuelling the SpaceX ‘Starship’ vehicle in orbit. He made the point that most of what would be added would be liquid oxygen. He stated therefore this was more ‘refilling than refuelling’. This got me thinking.

On Mars, if you released a bunch of methane and added a spark – nothing would happen. On Earth the results would be spectacular and hair-removing. There is no free oxygen in the atmosphere on Mars – and so no matter if you add enough activation energy to start a combustion reaction – something very significant is missing.

In the 1970s James Lovelock (one of my heroes) was engaged by NASA to help them define experiments looking for life that could be integrated into the Viking lander missions for the red planet. Having considered the problem for some time he concluded that all you needed to do was a spectroscopic analysis of the Martian atmosphere. If there was life present, its traces would be in the atmosphere as something that would change its composition from what you would expect around an inert lump of rock where ultraviolet radiation had meant almost every possible reaction in the atmosphere had proceeded to completion. On Earth – a planet with ubiquitous life, the atmosphere is very very different.

Which led me a step further, and to an inspiration from a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh that I had heard reported years ago. The talk involved the master holding up a piece of paper and inviting his audience to consider it, asserting that if they looked deeply enough the entire universe could be revealed to them through that piece of paper. All the relationships that had bought it into being; the sun powering trees to pull carbon from the atmosphere and weave it into fibre, the ancient Chinese and Egyptian civilizations that had discovered the precursors of paper, the millworkers, fresh water, the printing press, the delivery system, trucks, molecules, atoms, the space between them – on and on…

I assert we live under an illusion of separation that if we are to survive, we need to collectively break out of. That I can have ‘this’ without ‘that’. It is all related. Our individuality is an illusion (and it is difficult to write in almost any modern language without referencing the individual ‘me’, ‘they’, ‘I’ etc… – another blog post in there for sure…)

Coming back to the methane example – or firewood – or gasoline. Any ‘fuel’. We use the word ‘fuel’ to denote something that ‘contains energy’ that can be released through combustion; burning. This is a perceptual error. The fuel does not contain any of the energy released by combustion. It will not burn on Mars or outside of an atmosphere like that of Earth. That potential energy is only available through a reaction – a relationship with the part we take for granted – free oxygen in our atmosphere. It is the combination – fuel and oxygen through which the energy can be released. Coming back to Elon Musk – in what way is liquid oxygen any less part of the fuel than liquid methane when you are in space?

Within the burning of a fuel we are in relationship with the entire biosphere – the superorganism of which we are an integral part. Within a drop of gasoline you can view the entire universe – and the dramatic history of our planet. And also of a potential future which I trust we can act wisely enough to avoid.

The so-called fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) that we dig up, drill up, refine and burn like a guilty pleasure that we know has the potential to kill all of us and our children, were produced during two periods of extreme global warming 130 and 90 million years ago. At those times the surface temperatures of our planet, driven by high carbon dioxide concentrations, were some 15 degrees celsius warmer than today. There was abundant life – that had had millions of years to adapt to those conditions. Through anaerobic conditions created in shallow oxygen-depleted ocean dead-zones and on land in water-logged (and probably very dangerously smelly) swamps, the carbon captured from the atmosphere by photosynthesis was buried, compressed, heated and over aeons transformed into coal, oil and gas. There is a lot of it. Yet more carbon remains trapped in permafrosts and in what remains of our living forests and healthy oceans, under the seabed in methane hydrates…

To create the world which we inhabit, into which our species and those we share the planet with at this time have evolved, Gaia (just read James Lovelock – please…) has pulled carbon from the atmosphere and hidden it. Cooling the planet and eventually ushering in the ice ages that have preceded our own and creating the unusually stable conditions that we have called the ‘Holocene’, in which our species figured out agriculture and exploded across the globe.

And then – just 200 years ago, we discovered under our mothers’ skirts where that ancient Carbon had been hidden. And just as we had stolen fire from the Gods in the ancient past we lit new fires that created our industrial civilization. It has been one hell of a ride. Despite the impacts of pollution (read ‘death’) on many scales, as a species we continue to play the game that releasing this carbon is consequence free. We know it is not; the extended senses gifted to us by our discovery of Science has made that perfectly, and urgently clear. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat (just look at planet Venus). Earths biosphere is warming. The circulatory systems of the planet are responding. We see the symptoms; floods, extreme heat and cold where they have not been before, exceptionally violent weather. The sea is rising. Whilst we are an adaptable and clever species, we have made some terrible decisions about where and how to live in the face of changing weather patterns and sea levels.

We need – urgently – to come into right-relationship with the rest of the biosphere if we are to be part of it in the long run. It will be fine without us. I would like to think that it would be better with us – and maybe Earth could become the seed for a wiser and more compassionate life throughout all of the lifeless matter out there beyond our atmosphere. It is not a sure thing. It is going to take some serious work of which building rockets to get us out of our gravity-well is only a small part.

We need something beyond rocket science. We need wisdom…