Nicole+M’s+2017+OpEd+Article



====Have you ever just stared up at the night sky searching for the three stars that form Orion's belt, planets, galaxies, or even a shooting star? As you scour the night sky and your eyes rest on the brightest star, a planet!====

====Would you believe it if I told you the planet was Pluto it’s about 2.7 million miles away from earth that's about nine year's five months and 25 days of space travel to reach it? That's a long time to reach a tiny speck that we see in the night sky. It costs the US over 109 billion dollars, to only reach Pluto. Recently there has been a discovery of seven new plants that have a resemblance earth, and if you were to leave today march 3rd, 2017 you would reach the first of those new plants in 26 million years. As of now, we have no space ship with the capacity to travel that far let alone anyone human being who could possibly make the trip. So why are we allowing men and woman to sit on the butts staring into telescopes spending millions upon trillions of dollars, searching for planets that we don’t have the technology to even reach. Nor will we have that technology to travel that far into space for a very very long time. And the worst part is while there staring up at the sky and capturing attention, there looking over the fact that we are **DESTROYING** the planet we live on.====

====As of now, 70% of the earth is water, 97% of that being the ocean, that’s roughly 3/4th of earth that there has been little effort to discover. It seems as if every time someone goes on a deep sea dive a new species, plant, is discovered. Each animal's, species, and special we discover on these dives shock people and leaves us with the more undiscovered answer of what the ocean is. In addition to all of that, about 8 million tons of plastic gets dumped into the ocean every year and there are very little money and effort being put in to getting that out, let alone keeping it ocean to being with. We live in a society where rather than teaching our society to clean up the trash of the ground, recycle, or even compost it’s ok to pollute the ocean and environment. So why waste money paying people to sit on their butts staring up at stars while we don’t even know what the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean looks like. Why are we wasting time looking at the stars in search or a new plant when we don’t even understand our own fully?====

====In addition to polluting the ocean, have you ever walked outside seen that candy wrapper lying on the ground tossing in the wind, and not bothering to pick it up? Even though it was completely in reach and you had the ability to do so? Well you may have thought what difference would if it made to pick up that one little piece of trash, or it wasn’t a big piece, that’s not a big deal. But it is a big deal that piece of trash might find it’s way into the ocean and kill an animal or it of dropped out of your pocket and into the forest where a squirrel eats it. The squirrel's chokes on it and dies and other animals come to eat the squirrel and that animal dies. Every year millions of animals die or become close to extinction because the human races are too lazy to clean up after themselves.====

==== So let’s not be like those astrologers, why don’t we do something about OUR environment, OUR ocean, and OUR future. So don’t support space explorations it’s a waste of time when we don’t even understand the earth below our feet and in front of our eyes. Let’s save OUR earth, our planet, WE only have one! ====