North Star Writers Group

It’s bad enough that endless debris turns highways into hazard-filled, high-speed obstacle courses. Now we must beware of space junk falling on our heads.

A larger-than-golf-ball-size object that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home earlier this year isn’t a meteorite after all. It is made from an aluminum alloy that doesn’t occur naturally, according to the American Natural History Museum in New York. It’s now thought to be “orbital debris,” meaning part of a discarded satellite, rocket or some other spacecraft.

Wonderful. Not content to foul up our own planet, we human beings have spent the last five-plus decades of the “space age” littering our solar system and beyond with our discards, too.

Space exploration proponents have long argued that venturing outward will be the ultimate way to save humankind. Pardon the skepticism, but if we cannot live in harmony with each other here on Earth, and in harmony with the Earth itself, what makes us believe we can do so anywhere else?

This mirage of making a new start in a different physical location is also known as the “geographic solution.” English adventurers seeking a fresh start in a new location established what became Jamestown, Va., which just celebrated the 400^th anniversary of its founding. Alas, they brought their religious and racial prejudices with them, causing strife and untold misery and death for themselves and the native population.

Now that we have discovered what appears to be the first habitable planet outside our solar system, there will be an even greater push for space exploration. It’s inevitable, given human curiosity and drive to see what’s on the other side of the hill, the continent or the solar system. We will explore space, even if it takes trillions of dollars, countless lives and the real-life equivalent of the “warp drive” to conquer vast distances within our lifetimes.

Even so, it would not be at all surprising if, somewhere in our space sojourns, we meet the alien equivalent of the trash patrol. And, just like the character Klaatu in the film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” these beings will warn us that if we don’t change our messy ways, they will take pre-emptive action to annihilate us for behaving like intergalactic pests.

We may or may not find a place to survive in outer space. More likely we will spend all that money, time, effort and energy only to discover that even the ultimate in geographic solutions doesn’t work. No matter how far we go—across town, across the country, across the world or across the galaxy – we cannot escape the problems that bedevil us right here on earth. In other words, we can – and do – take it with us, unless we pause to remove it from within us before departing.

All that space junk, all that litter, all that pollution we see around us is a reflection with a message, if only we have the wisdom to pay heed to it and then the courage to act. If our Earth and even the skies around us are filled with junk and pollutants, it’s because our own hearts are brimming over with a noxious substance as well – self-judgment.

We judge ourselves, and because the pain of such self-judgment is so great, we turn it outward and judge others. We judge them because they don’t speak like we do, believe like we do, adhere to our specific codes of conduct . . . whatever. We judge them for being tree-huggers, for not being tree-huggers, for killing, for not killing, for being capitalists or not being capitalists, for owning guns, for not owning guns. The list is endless.

When and where does it all stop? Only when we examine our hearts and give up at least one self-judgment. It’s an invisible but momentous decision that eliminates one small source of inner pollution.

The more we clear out our hearts, the cleaner our world will be. It’s the self-affirming opposite of the self-destructive cycle we are in at present. With cleaner hearts and the resulting cleaner surroundings, who knows? We might even be welcomed then in other parts of the universe.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column #CT037. Request permission to publish here.