I feel like this is becoming my annual post on this day – I am probably the only one who wants Columbus Day to be turned into an Exploration Day.

It would contemplate, though not necessarily celebrate the drive for exploration and discovery that humans have while acknowledging all the downsides our exploration and expansion brings and contemplating how we could be less like a virus. We could then, look at Columbus and Vespucci and Magellan and Cook and Yermak and Livingstone and Lewis and Clarke as those who fearlessly (though not necessarily selflessly) went to the unknown and then see the horrors this brought to people and animals who already lived there. We could look at the fearless and probably desperate adventurers who went across Bering Straits land bridge into the unknown and all the way down to Tierra del Fuego and consider the catastrophe it brought to the American megafauna, and the Polynesian sailors and what they brought to the flightless birds of Aoteraoa / New Zealand, and what early humans coming out of North Africa have done to Neanderthals etc etc etc.

And having that sad day of introspection maybe would help us focus on how we would not behave the same way on other planets when we get there – because exploring and expanding is what we humans do.

Antarctica shows that we are capable of being better and it gives me hope.