I just realised something about those old scifi stories with life—plants, monsters, people—on Mars or the Moon or wherever.
They were written or otherwise made by people who had never seen a lifeless world.
We’ve all grown up with pictures and videos from the surfaces of those worlds. We’ve seen, since our early lives, landscapes without a trace of life. But before we had those, every human who had ever lived saw only one world and it was our teeming home.
It’s no wonder they imagined life everywhere because they’d never witnessed its total absence.
It’s interesting to note that our discovery of just how lifeless most of the universe is corresponded to the period during which modern environmentalism emerged.
(This isn’t a complete coincidence; a lot of the mainstream scientific attention to things like global warming only started to be paid after people noted the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus; space science is an Earth science)
im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!
an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.
“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids
