So yesterday was Blog Action Day 2010 and the theme was water. Basically close to a billion people today still don’t have access to clean water and consuming dirty water can lead to many different diseases. Coincidentally, my post last week linked a video about how UNICEF raised awareness through guerrilla marketing on this same issue. I hope innovative ideas and discussions have arisen to help solve this issue, but I’m curious about “Blog Action Day” in general.
It turns out, it started in 2007 and the theme back then was the environment, 2008 was poverty, and 2009 was climate change. While all of these are relevant and important issues, I’m curious who or how change.org (the website behind Blog Action day) decides on a theme.
This may sound a bit controversial, but I feel like some themes such as poverty and especially climate change, has quite a bit of attention already. I wish next year’s theme, they would choose something important but perhaps more… obscure or less main-stream (Note: I didn’t mind this year’s theme on water). Themes I personally would like to see is actually a bit more soteriologically (salvation types of ideas) driven. Don’t worry, I’m not imposing religious opinions on you but basically themes like Mars or the underwater world.
First I have a pretty big science/astronomy bias, but it really feels like space exploration is clearly not what it was as everytime it gets mentioned in the news, it’s usually about how they’re cutting funding for it. It’s just a feeling, but people today just don’t see practicality in going to Mars (and I don’t blame them) but that’s only because we’re so comfortable now. If the issues on climate change or other ways we’re killing our own planet, Mars is really the next logical step…
I figured I’ve already typed a lot and my argument may be better if it was delivered by physicists in song 😛
Another really underrated issue is the deep ocean actually. If anything, this might be easier to gain support as there is a bit more of a “practical” sense to it. If I remember correctly, there was a statistic saying how one or a few year’s funding of space exploration is greater than the funding underwater exploration has received…ever. We also actually know more about Mars’ surface than we do our ocean floors (mainly the deeper trenches we’ve never seen). The reasons we’ve been stumped is because of pressure basically, going underwater = more pressure, but in space = no pressure. The benefits can be huge though, getting closer to the core = potential source of energy? or maybe we could build underwater cities if overpopulation really gets out of hand.
I really don’t think my two suggested themes will become next year’s theme, but it’s kinda fun thinking about them and perhaps you as a reader can reply with any ideas/issues that you’d like to have awareness raised for : )
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