Let us finally dispense with “Mother Earth” — the concept, not our valuable old record albums. The planet is round, we exhaust its resources ever driven to go somewhere, and out there has been our obsession for as far as we know, which admittedly really isn’t very much. But there isn’t much mothering in a ball of sustaining fluid, it is in fact, more analogous to an egg.

For all practical purposes, it is an egg and all our conservation efforts won’t stop us from using it up. It’s our job, use it up to go on into the universe. We built our most ancient temples to honor and gaze upon that universe, the one that calls us. All religions somehow see our real parentage as somewhere out there, and they may be right.

But how will we go? In what forms? Our old structures that depend on making people do things just won’t hold. People will be made to do things by the harshness of space, not by other people. The institutions in this gravity well won’t reach out there . . . we all know that. That’s why those institutions really want none of this.

So what do they offer in lieu of our birth into the universe? Some mythical Eden is what they try to sell, a snake oil so horribly bland (imagine a "ranch dressing" of snake oil) that no one really and truly wants it so we dump crap into the rivers. But we really want to see the galaxies, don’t we? Our families may not be strong enough, families may be the basic unit. We may need three or four adults in a family to make it in a harsher universe, and won’t that twist up some people? So we have religions opposing it for other than fundamentalist reasons, they fear basic societal change forced by necessity on other places and on other worlds.

These questions must arise and rather than just deal with them, the road chosen by the carcinomas upon the social fabric that are our revered institutions, is to abort. That’s right, abort our entire species to die in this mud puddle, afraid to live.

Afraid to live . . . that’s what our pompous leaders and bemedalled “heroes” really are. For if we don’t go out there, and do it soon, we’re going to die here. We will never stride among the stars, we will drown in our shit. Saluting the people who led us there.

The abortion of our species.