Humans causing this vessel called Earth to have 'systems failure'

Piers Motley-Nash (Image: Piers Motley-Nash)

On April 21, Indonesian submarine Nanggala II went missing. While the exact details are not yet known, what killed the crew was when the submarine sank well beyond its operating depth and it's hull was compromised which would have led to their drowning.

I live on a spaceship with a very similar environment to the submarine.

Last week I read an article suggesting we have entered a new geological epoch.

Currently we are in the Holocene which began about 11,700 years ago. It requires a change in what makes up rocks, a process taking thousands of years, to herald a new period.

It seems that humans have managed to accelerate us into the Anthropocene Age in just a couple of hundred, starting with the fossil fuel particles of the Industrial Revolution, radioactive particles from the nuclear bomb tests and even the vast number of bones coming from our ever growing domesticated chicken.

I think we are now all too aware of some of the causes and effects of Global Warming, but I read that the melting of our polar ice caps and the 50 trillion tons we have taken from deep earth aquifers has actually caused the earth to tilt on it's axis which no doubt affects weather systems further.

We've also recently been treated to new views of Mars from a helicopter.

Perhaps the biggest threat to our environment is the permafrost containing millions of years of methane (an accelerant in global warming). A little warmer and this methane will melt releasing into the atmosphere with the effect that our planet could well end up looking like Mars.

So here we are back on our spaceship. Our atmosphere is contained by a very thin membrane which is certainly as delicate as that of the unlucky Indonesian submarine.

Many scientists have suggested Mars once had a similar atmosphere to Earth's, with rivers and lakes. The failure of one or more systems on board the vessel was probably an accident, possibly due to maintenance. The failure of Earth's systems is entirely down to humans and like the crew of the submarine the environment beyond our spaceship is very inhospitable.