Fly Me to the Moon (Or at Least My Ashes)
The Navajo Nation is upset. Seems some private rocket is going to haul cremated ashes up to their sacred moon. My sacred moon too. Probably lots of folks’ sacred moon. But theirs, so they claim, is a religious objection owing to the hard fact that earth’s satellite has always been a sacred object. The Hawaiians think the same of the volcano folks want to desecrate with an observatory. Golly, this opens up a wide door. First a volcano, then the moon, what’s next, all the stars in the galaxy?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not real keen on turning the lunar surface into a graveyard for rich folks’ ashes or caskets or whatever this private company is hauling up there. And while in my woke respectfulness of people’s right to worship the sun and the stars and most of Nature, it’s a Long Leap to laying claim to the Universe, even if I like to think my own claim is equally valid, not that I ever bought naming rights to a star like many did back when some company was selling trademarks.
Then again, maybe we should all get on board with the Navajos. We got so much space debris orbiting the planet we should complain about turning the atmosphere into our own planetary junkyard. Bad enough we filled Earth with plastics, from the North Pole to the South, all of us gunked up with nano-plastics just like every other creature on this fragile orb. Time maybe to make the moon off limits to our garbage and dead bodies.
But you know and I know too, the Navajo objections will fall on deaf ears and we’ll trash the moon same as we did our sacred little planet. The Musks and the Bezos will fly the rich there, corporations will lay claims to minerals and whatever else they can dig up, governments will build military outposts and orbit satellites there too. We might even have colonies up there. If we do, I don’t want them sending their ashes back here. We got our own mess, sacred or not.
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Tags: Burial on the Moon, Navajo Moon Rights, Who Owns the Moon?