So, as we have been told — ten thousand times over the last few days — it is the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.

It seemed like a pretty big deal at the time, our first true step toward making those Star Trek fantasies reality; people stood before their televisions, glasses of whiskey in their hands, and wept with pride and the excitement of things to come.

Having heard Neil Armstrong's voice "One small step"- etc. over and over, I am now beginning to feel a sense of nonevent about the whole thing. Within the frame work of all this palaver, 40 years on, there has only been one passing mention of anyone else's having done the walk on the moon.

"Only a dozen astronauts have walked the moon since then," one announcer said.

I didn't know there had been any more moon landings - certainly, there was very little fuss, in comparison, made of those subsequent walks. Anyway, the next one is not going to happen before 2020!

In a recent press conference, one of the original moon-walk astronauts, now in his 70's, as they all are, commented: "The moon is not a very interesting place — Mars is, though."

The first problem with a Mars walk is getting there — in a smallish capsule, taking in excess of six months for the journey. That's just for starters; never mind the damage to the person of the combination of long-term weightlessness (leading to osteoporosis) and muscular atrophy due to lack of exercise.

When Marco Polo went to China he merely opened up lines of trade without grave deleterious effects on the local population, which was numerous enough and tough enough to weather any influence a European might bring.

When, however, the "white men" went to Africa, they transported disease and conflict; they abused the land and the people, transporting both at will and returning nothing of good to the lands and the people they ravaged. In every way, the populations of the continent of Africa are still paying the cost of history there.

Similarly, when they began to explore North and South America, they stole and killed at random, always in the opinion that the world belonged to them. In the long run, there was more of an inclination to completely overrun the American continents forever, where Africa has been mostly taken back but altered and damaged, perhaps irreparably.

Not that I am worried about the folk who populate other planets at the moment. There is no question in my mind that there are other folk — there are, for sure. This is not the only planet in the universe with life on it. That life cannot be imagined, of course, even though we writers of fiction do love to speculate.

We are quite tethered by our own environment, after all, but I sure hope that they are all more intelligent and benevolent than is the human species (and rats and viruses).

No, what worries me is the fact that we show no inclination whatsoever to clean up our own back yard before we embark on the unutterably expensive adventure of trying to reach other worlds to mess up.

Such walks as there have been on the moon have only resulted in heaps of junk being left behind.

There are still virtually unreachable places on earth but the greedy eyes of those who are researching the ways of attaining them only have their destruction in mind.

The perils of the Arctic will soon be conquered so that the potential for drilling for oil and other riches can be started.

The purity and importance of the Arctic to the world will be ignored for the sake of short-sighted awards while long term damage will be inflicted on this precious territory just as it has been on every other accessed area of the world.

Once the depths of the oceans can be brought within our reach, we will exploit and ruin all within. We will discover fantastic creatures in those depths, heretofore safe from our malevolence and treachery, and, in all likelihood, we will cause critical changes to their environment.

It is not an issue of money, it is a matter of mind-set. Humans are basically lazy, myopic and unimaginative. We are complacent beyond sanity, allowing and participating in the devastation of our world and excessive afflictions for the majority of the people living on it.

We agree by our silence to the use of war as a primary support to the economy, however much suffering it imposes; we acquiesce to the continuing pollution of our atmosphere, land and water by maintaining the current fashion of how our industries and agriculture are run; we vote for politicians who have no will and no passion for change and improvement.

Famous scientist Stephen Hawkins ("one of the greatest brains of the century") said recently that mankind should start trying to reach planets which are habitable for us, as our path of ruin for this earth may well make it uninhabitable before too long. It was a back-handed comment on our failings which I have just reiterated in a more blunt fashion.

With the mountain range of money that is spent on space "exploration" and war, the problems of this world could long since have been solved.

But we all know that — it is a wellworn complaint. There is no excuse for the deprivations that exist in this world.

The only reason is that those with the power to alleviate and remedy the causes, won't.