Humanity is on the verge of becoming an international community. It’s inevitable and beneficial for each of us. One of the primary goals of Eleanor Lives! is to further this transition. Eleanor, as the “First Lady for the World” had her gaze fixed on creating this community. As she said in her own “My Day” column, May 11, 1934, “We will all go ahead together, or we will all go down together.”
Starlink is a good example. Starlink is a neural net of satellights around our planet, Earth. Elon Musk and the company Space X has initiated the accomplishment, and now has put over 1,000 satellights into near Earth orbit. Starlink has the potential to share knowledge with everyone on Earth – no matter how remote the corner, the collective knowledge of humanity will be at each of our fingertips. Please click on this video link to watch a short story about the promise and peril of Starlink.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-42000-starlink-satellites-earth-effects-stars-2020-10
And it’s not just knowledge that Starlink opens for us, it’s a new way of life. Now, the brilliant work of anyone can be made available to everyone. When a new medical treatment is discovered in India, that treatment can be made accessible to every hospital on Earth. The same is true with ideas, whether it be in psychology, physics or law, ideas can be shared and the collective use of them leads to unexpected breakthroughs that combined thinking can accomplish in a way that the thinking of an individual cannot.
As an example, Missy Lahren, an Eleanor Lives! Board member, has recently completed her Ph.d dissertation, defended it, and is now Dr. Lahren. Congratulations to her! But also, congratulations to all of us. For her dissertation, Missy painstakingly designed an engaging middle school curriculum for students in all countries for Earth Day, celebrated each year on April 22.
With Starlink, Missy’s curriculum can be shared in our common space, literally, and used in all schools, in all countries, as part of a shared cellebration. In this way the boundryless perspecitve Missy evokes in words, pictures, discussion and play becomes boundryless in application. The stories we tell create the lives that we lead. Starlink empowers us to tell, and teach, stories globally.
The difficult questions left for Starlink are who owns it? and who can use it? The answers are simple: it should be owned by everyone – Starlink is an information superhighway. Highways are rarely privately owned on Earth and this highway should not be either. It should be owned, and funded, by all of humanity.
Next, it should be free. Anyone on Earth, anywhere on Earth, should be able to access Starlink in an instant, and without payment. If there is a high volume of use, then there may be charges, but for everyday searching for information, or to report illegal acts such as the violation of rights, for example, access should be easy, and free.
This shared course in space is more than just for the well-being it brings, it is for the destruction it prevents. It is a huge mistake for humanity to militarize space. Within our international community, there are still archane nationalistic forces that want to have space become a militarized competitive arena. We must stop them.
There are also those who would censor the dissemination of ideas such as democracy, equality for women or evidence of environmental destruction. Eleanor Lives! is not just coffee table talk, although it certainly is fitting there, including discussion of Starlink, it is the knitting of an international community. So when you read this, if you haven’t already, please help build that community by becoming a “light for rights” on the Eleanor Lives! spinning globe, and share a few thoughts about the potential of Starlink with a few friends and family too.
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