A dead planet on World Environ Day

Published on: Sunday, June 06, 2021

By: Kan Yaw Chong

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Mars’ infamous giant dust storm that can blanket the entire planet for months captured by an American surface rover.

JUNE 5 is World Environment Day, first launched in 1974 by the United Nations. Forty-six years had past but has the environment got better?

Mark Holle, and I go straight to his point, said: “Any sober assessment of the trends over those decades must conclude not only has it failed but failed spectacularly!” Not that nobody was doing nothing.

In fact, World Environment Day attracted worldwide acclaim in 1974 but Holle noted the contradiction:

“Despite a great deal of energy and enthusiasm invested, the enterprise has been a failure.”

Actually Holle’s cynicism was directed at the notion of “sustainable development”, how it purported to protect Planet Earth through organised economic development, is a flop.

Once again, it’s a classic show of Tragedy of The Commons, where most have an incentive not to be there for it.

Collective psychopathy

So what’s the problem? I would say human – the one totally out-numbered species on Earth but unfortunately dominant and hegemonic in actual conduct, his typical burst of enthusiasm but invariably short-lived, his shallow affect, his ingenuine emotion, his typical inability to form attachment relationships with anything or anybody in this case mother Earth, his grandiose sense of self-importance or better-than-thou attitude, so that the wildlife, rivers, forests, the seas are looked upon as nothing, his superficial interest and care meaning lack of empathy, his lack of guilt and remorse over what he has done for which I leave it to everybody’s imagination and his conduct problem of it all – typically very good at proactively planning self-centric acts in manipulating people to get something they want – maybe power, maybe money, maybe primacy, maybe economic advantage and not worry about hurting others. In this case, we can say the environment.

By the way, these are characteristics of a psychopath.

He is dangerous. Serial killers were all found to be psychopaths. Scary and sobering but I am not clever enough to know all these.

I happened to bump into a lecture on psychopath and it occurred to me that maybe there is a persistent collective psychopathic trait lodged deeply in the human race that is bludgeoning the environment and the ecosystems to their rapid decline.

So how do we convince or persuade the human race to empty themselves of these destructive psychopathic traits to make World Environment Day genuine?

World Mars Day & all the bad news

A weird idea struck me. Maybe launch a World Mars Day.

That’s why I decided a Special Report on a dead Planet Mars today might jolt people better instead of the usual struggle to prick the deep slumber how wonder Earth is.

Let people imagine they are taken to a brutally hostile desert Planet Mars where you won’t find a single life from one end to the other of a dead planet.

Immediately, humans lose their supreme status as the dominant species because there is nothing to dominate.

Immediately, the reverse happens – from arrogance over the environment to a total subordinate.

Bad news for politicians because there is no one to vote and empower them.

Bad news for fishermen because there are no oceans or lakes or rivers to fish from.

Bad news for fish bombers because there are no fish to bomb!

Bad news for loggers and foresters because there are no forests to keep and trees to cut.

Bad news for even WWF because there is no life and no jobs for conservation.

Bad news for Walai Penyu Conservation Park Libaran Island because there are no beaches, no turtles to land and nest.

Bad news for Bora because no point rebranding to bring back our rare animals because there are no animals on Mars.

Good news maybe for Blu Hope Sabah’s Plastic Neutral Project because there’s nobody there to either make or throw plastics.

Grandiose plan when man is hungry

I know Elon Musk has a grandiose plan to colonise Mars with 80,000 people but that’s also bad news because it’s exclusive not inclusive and see how his rockets kept exploding and crashing.

Critics wonder how escaping to a dead planet by abandoning a planet of life is man’s future.

Yes, man is the dominant species but not one species need man to live.

On the other hand, when man gets hungry, they can survive only by eating other living species.

So humans are completely dependent on a planet of life to stay alive.

Mars won’t do. Venus is worse with a scorching surface temperature of 727 degrees F, where lead would melt, so hostile that life is simply impossible.

Therefore, Planet Earth is the only hand that feeds us and no other – the truth and nothing but the truth, what one popular Chinese idiom reminds us – “Drink water, think source”.

If we forget this, I found it very stunning why Mars is dead!

Why is Mars dead?

During the late 1970s, America’s Viking landers 1 & 2 famously sought life on Mars, but came up empty.

Since then, American Martian surface rovers include Sojourn, Sprit & Opportunity, Curiosity and last February, Perseverance and Ingenious helicopter, followed by China’s Zhurong exploration rover which landed on May 19, 2021.

Besides rovers, Nasa had also deployed many orbiters and orbital pictures reveal some stunning Martian landscapes but all these probes had made one fact abundantly clear – Mars is a cold desert planet devoid of life.

Yet this is precisely the purpose of World Environment Day – make sure Earth doesn’t go the way of Mars!

So why is Mars dead?

Dr Brian Thomas noted Mars’ “naked” atmosphere.

“Mars has virtually no atmosphere which is only 1pc that of Earth’s or 100 times thinner than Planet Earth, cannot retain solar heat on the surface, does not protect Mars from unfiltered ultra violet solar radiation that human can barely tolerate, prevents liquid water on the surface, difficult to grow food even in a greenhouse – a hostile and brutal environment for life.

“Data clearly shows its surface would be extraordinarily hostile to anything resembling a living cell.”

Furthermore, it is saturated with CO2 but only trace amounts of oxygen, water vapour and other gases.

Nasa breaks down its atmospheric composition as follows:

- Carbon dioxide: 95.32pc (Earth’s 0.04pc)

- Nitrogen: 2.7pc (Earth’s 78.1pc)

- Argon: 1.6pc (Earth’s 0.93pc)

- Oxygen: 0.13pc (Earth’s 20.9pc)

- Carbon monoxide: 0.08pc (Earth’s 0.75pc)

- plus trace amounts of water etc

Precise difference between a dead planet and a planet of life

Temperature determines lots of things. So distance from the Sun counts.

Mars is 154 million miles (249 million km) from the Sun, compared to Earth’s 91.3 miles (l47 million km) – a location in the Solar System known as the Goldilock Zone – a remarkably small and habitable zone which is the range of distance with the right temperature for water to remain liquid that does not even include the whole Earth, that is, no colder than Antarctic, not hotter than the scalding deserts, no higher than the clouds, not deeper than mine microbes.

Life-sustaining conditions are indeed very fragile and precarious but Earth provides that absolute precision to enable life but psychopathic humans are carelessly removing life and ecosystems out of it!

But there is an interesting insight into why is Mars’ atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s.

Gravity is a factor.

One key reason is Mars’ gravity is only 38pc that of Earth’s because its mean diameter is 6,779km, much smaller than Earth’s 12,742km size wise.

So it’s lighter gravity does not hold the atmosphere as tightly as Earth.

What happened? All accounts point to 4 billion years ago when Mars lost it global magnetic field which could have directed solar wind around the planet.

But because it had lost its magnetic field, solar winds entered directly to strip away lighter atoms and molecules, lowering the density creating virtually a naked atmosphere.

Earth is a true contrast

In contrast, Planet Earth which was also formed about four billion years ago, had never lost its magnetic field.

This is because convection or fluid motion in the outer core of Earth that moves conducting liquid iron had remained active non-stop since the beginning and, therefore, able to sustain what is called the Dynamo Effect or self exciting dynamo which is the origin of Earth’s magnetic field.

What is still driving Earth’s active convection in the outer core is the immense left-over heat resulting from the massive collision friction and compression of space rocks after the Big Bang four billion years ago while radioactive decay of Earth ‘s interior materials kept adding heat to it by as much as 50pc.

This is why Earth’s interior remains very hot after four billion years while Mars had lost that.

The result is clear. Earth’s magnetic field keeps its atmosphere in place while Mars lost its magnetic field resulting in a naked atmosphere which makes life impossible!

“Mars’ average surface temperature is minus 80 degrees F or 60 degrees Celsius so it is also too cold to sustain life,” Dr Thomas said.

Giant dust storms

The climate of Mars comes from a variety of factors, including ice caps, water vapour and dust storms.

At times, giant dust storms can blanket the entire planet and last for months.

These giant dust devils routinely kick up the oxidised iron dust that cover Mars’ surface.

“The oxidised iron that covers the rocks red is hazardous to life – another reason why Mars is a dead planet,” Dr Thomas said.

Since carbon is a building block of life, evolutionists had hoped they could find microscopic life but rover probes found no evidence of organic carbon at levels detectable at parts per billion – no evidence of liquid water either other than evaporates, layers of sandstones, even conglomerates but no carbonate nor shales – all the way back to billions of years, pretty serious look to find nothing, according to an online opinion.

So what is the purpose of this special report? Make sure Earth does not go the way of Mars!

A barren and desolate Matian surface – face of a dead planet.

An ice-filled Korolev-Crater on Mars’ in the northern lowlands 81.4km wide but the ice is composed of carbon dioxide, not water. It is named after Russian rocket engineer.