Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers is a privileged person. He spends months at a time circling the Earth at an altitude of 400 kilometers. It takes his spacecraft one and half hours to circle the Earth and he goes round 16 times a day.
Up there, in the quiet of space, he has the chance to reflect. In the International Space Station, he looks down and sees the beauty and fragility of our planet, “seemingly huge on the ground,” he says, but small when viewed from space.
Kuipers is an ambassador for the environment and he is a worried man. There are only 10 kilometers of atmosphere and at most 10 kilometers depth of ocean. That’s our living space.
Think about that number for a moment. 10 kilometers. Maybe it is the distance into your local town. Maybe it is the maximum you run. Maybe it is the length of a walk you do on a weekend. If you drove it, maybe it would take you 10 minutes.
This is the layer of atmosphere we live in, all 7 billion of us. And that is another figure to mull over. Think of that number a moment. That is seven thousand million people. And that number is growing. Every hour, there are 9,000 more people born.
Kuipers’ point is that we need to take care of our planet. He says he can see forest fires, pollution, erosion and many other results of Man’s carelessness. Every day we are pumping tons of carbon dioxide into this thin layer of atmosphere.
“These things motivate me to do something for our planet,” he says.
He recently took the opportunity to do probably one of the most innovate launches of a report on Earth – well, to be more exact, from space.
Check out what he says about the WWF’s “Living Planet Report.”
This report should give everybody living on Earth pause for thought.
Kuipers’ thoughts from space should make us think – When are we going to take the threats we pose to our planet seriously?
