By Christian Lutkemeyer
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September 1, 2025
Fellow Castaways on planet Earth, I would like to take the occasion that the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, James A. Lovell, recently passed away to share my thoughts on lifeboats. Please refer to the collage of pictures attached to this post to connect with this text. Most of you are probably familiar with the tragic, but teachable story of the Titanic. Designed and built to be “unsinkable”, the unthinkable happened before the marvel of its time could even finish the maiden voyage. It hit an iceberg that pierced so many sections of the partitioned hull that it could not stay afloat. This was a strike of nature that the designer of the ship had not foreseen. Many passengers died because of the hubristic assumption. The richest of them was John Jacob Astor IV, a well-known American business magnate who was returning from his honeymoon with his pregnant, younger second wife, Madelaine. She survived the disaster. Sadly, there were not enough lifeboats on Titanic because they would have spoiled the view. There was a time where rich aristocrats and gentlemen were willing to sacrifice their own life for women and children, even the ones in Third Class. I am pretty sure that Our “ME FIRST” President would have been found in the first lifeboat, if he was faced with such a moral decision. I came across John Jacob Astor and his connection to the Titanic at a corporate event where close to 50 employees were flown from all over the World for one day to New York, to ring the opening bell of the NASDAQ Exchange. We stayed at the luxury St. Regis Hotel, founded in 1904 by Astor. There was a glass vitrine that mentioned his unfortunate demise. History is interesting and educational. I believe that there is a invaluable lesson from God to all of us in the story of the Titanic. Recently I watched a thought-provoking documentary about the Titan Submersible that was built by the company OceanGate to offer tourist dives to the remains of the Titanic. Sadly, the experimental carbon fiber hull of Titan was crushed by the immense pressure of the icy Atlantic, incrementing the fatality count at this grave site by four precious souls. The implosion of the Titan was so sudden that its passengers could not even send a SOS (Save Our Souls) back up to their mothership. There was also no lifeboat on Titan. The parallels to Titanic are striking. Humans’ vanity and engineering hubris are alive and well. You may want to watch this documentary to appreciate how there were warning signs about the flaws in Titan’s design and implementation. There was an engineer who spoke up and took action to prevent the disaster. He was shut down with a lawsuit. The sub even had a special early failure detection system that recorded the acoustic cracks when individual carbon fibers were breaking. The data was recorded and shows that at some point the rate of fractures was going up massively. The hull essentially went over a failure cliff. These cautionary signs were ignored to save the business. When humans have a choice between riches and life, unfortunately too many of us choose money for ME over the life of others. We are whistling us to our own grave. A rather hopeful and inspiring message is sent from the Apollo 13 disaster that ended well thanks to the creativity and resourcefulness of the crew and the large supporting team back in Houston. After the explosion of an oxygen tank on the service module, the crew of three evacuated to the capacity-for-two Lunar Module. They had to deal with limited oxygen, electricity, and water. To save themselves, they used the engines of the Lunar Module to control their space-drift around the Moon and back to Earth. One of the critical dangers that the crew had to overcome was a deadly buildup of CO2 in their small atmosphere on this six-day long Odyssey. Only by creating a makeshift CO2 scrubbing device from a small set of repurposed, misfit components did they succeed in maintaining their atmosphere healthy enough to stay alive until they could return to the command module for the final successful descend through Earth’s precious but thin atmosphere. When I think what today’s Congress would have recommended them to do, I am pretty sure that Congress would have told the imperiled castaways that they were sending them thoughts and prayers, and that they should light a candle, join the prayers, and perhaps smoke some marijuana to calm their anxiety while slowly perishing in the increasingly toxic atmosphere without addressing the root cause of the emergency. We clearly don’t have a Congress who sees the deadly problems of our times and acts decisively to promote our survival. They just send thoughts and prayers and do a lot of trashtalking while enriching themselves, selling us out serving the special interests. Personally, I am worried about the following deadly sustainability emergencies that are threatening the Earth module that we all share: 1. Dysfunctional national government The US Government system is marketed as a Democracy by our politicians, but it is a DINO (Democracy In Name Only). When we compare the simple scheme of one voter = one vote to the reality of a poorly aged, prototype system with Electoral College rounding up and down the weight of votes in each State, and Gerrymandered districts used to dilute the power of the party that is out of power at the State level, we have a system that is not able to react to small shifts of voter movements to guide the flight of the ship-of-state between Scylla and Charybdis. In this system individual votes don’t matter in most precincts. Only a few districts in a few states provide any input and find themselves inundated with election propaganda and lies. In recent elections we see that unhappy, disoriented voters who are in panic over the careening clown car of corrupted Government are trying to sledge-hammer the stuck steering wheel back and forth to turn the ship around towards safety. The culmination of this erratic and accelerating slide toward the cliff is the Trump 47 administration. A purely self-interested, trash-talking, toxic Agent Orange of Horror was able to escape justice by stalling the slow-moving crawl of the exhausted and blindfolded lady justice with money and spurious legal arguments by his corrupted lawyers. Now he has been able to wantonly sabotage the intentionally balanced, but inflexible structures of Government. Trump and his white blood cell minions are like the white blood cells of a body with a severe autoimmune disease who will not relent their destructive march before the infected body dies. Trump himself was damaged over four decades as he absorbed lead (Pb) that was dispersed through leaded gasoline everywhere where Americans drove. Lead is a known neuro toxin and is connected to violence and crime. Congress has abdicated its power of the purse and duty to set a course for the ship and hold the captain accountable to execute the laws faithfully. At this point Congress is a group of hostages who are toeing the party line to avoid getting culled by the corruptly pardoned January 6th wolves who have proven their willingness to violently enforce master Trump’s lawless, unfaithful desires. Congress’ decisions are solely driven by fear for their own lives and families. They are unable to comprehend the calamitous trajectory for all of Earth’s vital functions. Nobody fights. Some chose flight by not running for reelection to escape captivity. The majority appears happy to take advantage of the corrupt state to enrich themselves and create personal life rafts. White blood cells on a rampage. They belong in prison cells! The US is circling with rapid acceleration around the Abyss. When will the turd of a formerly great nation come out at the business end of the golden toilet? In what shape? Where is the lifeboat for this problem? The opposition can only master incoherent and meek whimpers, a cacophony of almost inaudible voices divided over many different frequencies (X, Substack, Blue Sky, Truth Social, Youtube, Tiktok, …) None of the terrified passengers truly knows how many others are desperate to turn the ship around to safety because there is no shared reality that we all experience. 2. Dysfunctional international order The United Nations were created after the horrible experience of World War II to ensure that large and small countries could exist peacefully and cooperatively with each other. Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine and Trump’s musings of acquiring Canada and Greenland clearly prove that the special veto powers that their countries were bestowed with at the inception of the UN have been forfeited. Rules must be symmetrical and held up consistently and not just used as cudgels when it is convenient for the powerful to create the appearance of a rule-based system. The countries of the World are bullied by the Superbullies with their grotesquely supersized nuclear arsenals that have gorged themselves on precious resources that would have been better directed to move humanity forward on a sustainable path to a shared, positive and healthy future. 3. Climate change The voracious exploitation of fossil fuels has powered an amazing, exponential explosion of knowledge and technologies. We must be grateful for the sacrifices of previous generations of miners who gave up health, and frequently even their lives, to extract energy, created by primitive life over millions of years, from the dark, dangerous depths of Earth. We have reached a point where further exploitation of fossil fuels and the pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases is putting us on the road to climate hell. Over the previous 400,000 years CO2 in the atmosphere never exceeded 300ppm. In just my lifetime, less than 60 years, it has increased from 330ppm to 425ppm. Science has established that CO2 in the atmosphere leads to global warming. This knowledge was the foundation for the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Under the Trump EPA (Environmental Pollution Agency) there is a push to remove the well-established safeguards and reestablish the freedom to pollute the atmosphere with impunity for profit of special interests. They even are shutting down the measurement systems and satellites that exist to monitor these harmful pollutants. Our ancestors knew long ago that eyes are precious. Why do you think the Bible mentions “an eye for an eye”? Will we allow the white Trump cells to do to the US what we would never accept from our worst enemy? It appears the US Supreme Court is happy to operate in a blinded state. Just look at blindfolded Lady Justice who is their powerless mascot in this battle. While the blindfolded Justices are stumbling around in the dark, the White Trump Cells are turning off the lights. Technology exists to rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels. A personal example: In 2015 we invested in Solar Panels and a Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In 10 years and over 159,000 miles this car has been a joy to drive around town and some longer trips with an average of 170MPG. Had we chosen a gas-only SUV like many others did, we would have burned 8.5 times as much gasoline. If many consumers had made a similar investment at that time we could be living in a world where crude oil only costs $20 on the global market. Russia would not have enough money to wage their violent and deadly war of aggression on their neighbor. It is not too late to start to move in this direction. We are now seeing wanton tariffs thrown at countries for buying Russian oil. The civilized, peace-loving countries in the world could choose to tax themselves on the consumption of harmful oil and then use the tax revenue to start to crimp our self-destructive thirst for oil. Just the declaration of such a plan would likely bring the global oil price down quickly when oil producers see that their noxious boondoggle is going down and they have only little time to extract profits. With such a substantial “Freedom Tax” on fossil fuels we would keep more money on our side of the global game board. That money would be able to fund the transition into a sustainable, renewable energy future for our children and to cushion the transition for those of US who need help. Unlike in Donalds erratic tariff game, the Freedom Tax would be truly paid by the producers of oil. If they can pump a barrel of oil for $15, they can sell it for $20 and still survive. We just need to curb our own addiction to oil to help stop feeding the beast and help that peace has a chance. Ferocious fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires in California in January 2025 show clearly that our society is not prepared to handle the scale and severity of the fire superstorms that can be ignited by a single spark when the weather is “right”, or better wrong, to fan the flames and eviscerate whole cities with countless fatalities. Our awe-inspiring (in some deranged minds) capability to stack bunker-busting bombs on top of each other to pierce deep underground nuclear facilities on the other side of the globe is no match to mother nature’s primal forces that will easily reduce our lemming shelters to ash and toxic waste in a few hours on a sunny afternoon. We think we are unsinkable, but our high-tech society is extremely vulnerable with many Achilles heals inviting catastrophic failure or attacks by nefarious enemies. Just imagine a paranoid, single, old madman with an aging sensor system and compromised executive function at the controls of a nuclear arsenal with flawed information from an aging sensor system, asked to make a global kill decision in minutes under duress. We are only one electronic or software bug and a mind fart away from self-annihilation of Homo Sapiens. To me it appears that it is not a question of if but when we will win a collective Darwin Award when we accidentally blow up the crackling, sagging branch that helped us climb to the top of the evolutionary tree. Menacing nuclear guns are locked and loaded with hair triggers ready to administer the sinister, final solution to all of Homo Sapiens. What awesome and awful power we have created. We are all living under the nuclear sword of Damocles. Can Hollywood keep us all distracted and peaceful long enough until we wipe us out? “Don’t look up!” captures our Zeitgeist spot on. 4. Severe and accelerating pollution of the vital biosphere that we need for wellbeing and survival Humanity is looking down on an amazing journey of discovery in the realm of natural sciences. Many of the items that we grasp every day are a product of chemistry and engineering. Unfortunately, quite a few inventions that were highly decorated when they were first discovered turned out to be Faustian bargains that backfired badly after initially showing great promises. When Thomas Midgeley Jr. discovered Freon, it replaced flammable, or toxic, or explosive substances in refrigeration applications. He received the “Midgley Priestley Medal” for his Pioneering work on Freon and tetraethyl lead (T.E.L.) in 1941. Many decades later the link between Freon and the Ozone hole was established and Humanity had to change course to maintain the critical Ozone layer protection of Earth’s atmosphere against destructive radiation from the Sun. Looking at T.E.L. it was obvious from the very beginning that it was a bad idea. Midgley himself was severely poisoned at one point during the development. Workers in the manufacturing plant reported seeing butterflies flying where there were no flowers. The financial benefit of having a compound that could be patented outweighed the toxicity concerns. Society accepted or was bribed through corrupt officials to endure sustained poisoning of everybody with a constant dose of neuro toxin for many decades. Special interests were making money hand over fist. The national lead intoxication only stopped when the lead was identified as toxic for the platinum in catalytic converters who were required to clean up other noxious tailpipe emissions. Thanks to the catalytic converter the air quality in big cities has improved massively. There are even blue Skys in sunny Southern California these days. Until the clouds of ICE raids moved in. Plastic has been a universal and cheap product with amazing versatility and a lot of short-term benefits. Unfortunately, plastic does not break down in the biosphere. It falls apart into invisible, hard-to-detect microplastic particles that are accumulated in the food chain and will ultimately lead to our brains getting plasticized from within. Think about a future where Homo Sapiens consists of the same material and is as intelligent as a Barbie Doll. We must turn away from plastics to compostable materials that can be part of a healthy, circular economy that creates value for humans without destroying Earth’s vital functions. Forever chemicals (PFAS), a large family of substances with molecules that are indestructible in the natural environment, are another accumulating time bomb that we must defuse. 5. Unsustainable fiscal trajectory Giving tax cuts to the rich and underfund the Government while the economy is healthy is no investment in a healthy, sustainable future. It is a corrupt act that steals from our children and future generations. 6. Loss of a shared purpose We live in a time where many young people ask themselves what the purpose of their lives could be. In the past, religion, nationality, culture, and language established communities that provided a meaningful direction through life. At the same time these diverse value systems also created dividing lines and a lot of discord and even wars. I believe that working on the many global sustainability challenges could be a shared purpose for all of humanity. We all need a healthy atmosphere to breeze, clean water to drink, clean food, and peace. Let me return to the lifeboat theme. If we asked Jeff Bezos about his preferred lifeboat he might point to his superyacht. I personally have a lot of doubts that this pleasure boat will be a real lifeboat when the Trashtalker’s foot with the bone spurs kicks the nuclear football out of the ballpark in a moment of rage and spite against humanity. If we asked Elon Musk what a lifeboat for humanity should be, he appears to choose Mars. He is dedicating a lot of resources to ultimately sending humans to the Red Planet. Humans’ biology has evolved over hundreds of Millions of years and is finely tuned to Earth’s beautiful environment with a nourishing and protective atmosphere. If a larger number of humans would go to Mars, it would require a tremendous amount of oxygen to accommodate the amount of Marijuana-smoking that would be needed to keep those Muskonauts “happy”. Thanks, but no thanks. This is not a good solution IMHO. Finally, I would like to share my personal vision of the most suitable lifeboat for all of us here on Earth. Here is a riddle: I spy something with my little eye that is an OBBB. I spy something with my little eye that is not “The One Big Beautiful Bill”. I spy something that cannot be easily seen. I spy something that is BIG. I spy something that is blue. I spy something that is One Big Blue Ball. When I look at the Earth-rising picture from the Apollo 8 mission I see the potential to create a lifeboat for 10,000,000,000 people that could traverse our galaxy for a very long time, like 100,000 years. Imagine the wonderful knowledge that we could accumulate if we could create a sustainable, peaceful civilization that endures over a timescale 4,000 times longer than the period since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We can be the truly conservative generation that started the “Earthshot” initiative, the Global Sustainability Reformation that conserved Earth for future Generations. Or we can be the Generation that walked blindly over the edge of the cliff and dropped the nuclear football. I have a dream: We can all join and salvage this beautiful and precious lifeboat Earth before the special interests finish scuttling it. I believe that Donald Trump was saved by God when the attempted assassination in Buttler only grazed his ear. I believe that God’s act and protection helped Trump to get elected as the 47th POTUS. I believe that God saved Trump to serve as HIS Orange Highlighter of Corruption at the national and international level. Trump was very quick in revealing fundamental, systemic weaknesses of the US constitution and UN charter that essentially open the path for corrupting forces that can destroy the original, good intent at the foundation of these rules-based systems. Trump is God’s WRONG WAY sign to humanity. I believe that God saved Trump and made him behave so arbitrary, corrupt, and destructive as a shot across the bow to all of humanity to show how corruptible WE are and to clearly show that we all are on the WRONG WAY. I believe that God saved Trump and let the bullet graze his ear as a shot across his bow to give him a chance to think about his eternal future, to find his road to Damascus, and to lead the world in the opposite direction of his initial corrupt acts towards a sustainable future. Let us all work together to turn this ship around. Global sustainability can be a uniting, fulfilling vision that transcends cultures, languages and countries. We all share a common biology. We can share a vision that guides us to a shared, beautiful and peaceful future. MEGA! Make Earth Great Again! Godspeed A Trashwalker, Christian Lutkemeyer