To an ordinary person, a life raft, an island, and the earth may not resemble in any way. They! re different in physical appearance, in emotional affections, and even in literary symbolic meaning. But to an environmentalist, these three systems have many similarities in their way of supporting livelihood. With limited resource and unlimited demand due to population, no matter how big a system is (in this case, the planet earth is the biggest comparing to the other two), livelihood must be restricted to sustainable development. Generally, people in these three systems face similar living condition! a sharing but competing with each other for the limited resource in order to survive. On a life raft, the survivals have limited food and water supplies, so they have to restrain their wants to the least amount and wait for the salvation to come.
Otherwise, everybody will be destroyed by the afflictions on sea. On a moderate size island, the residents only have access to the resource on that island. Unless they import goods (which will lead to high cost of living such as that in Hawaii), they must not over exploit the resource. Otherwise, the livelihood cannot sustain when the resource are used up (which is the case of Easter Island).
On the earth, every country is to promote its economy and maintain a decent livelihood for its citizens. In history, many countries have invaded and destroyed others for their rich resource, such as the case of Japan vs.
China in World War II. However, due to rapid population growth, people cannot find much more resource anywhere on the earth, so if we do not restrict the waste of resource, we will come to a day of ultimate destruction. Despite the environment of these three systems, the most distinctive difference among them is the need or the chance for help. While the survivals could have the hope for salvation and the residents on islands could import goods, human beings on the earth have no other resource besides those already on the earth. If they are used up, they are gone forever! We cannot place our future depend on the hope of help from extraterrestrials or importations from outer space! In short, human beings are living in a big life raft named the Earth. If we do not restrain our greedy wants of resource to sustainable amount, the resource on this raft can no longer serve our needs and the extinction of humans and all other species will be right at the corner waiting for us..
The Term Paper on Thailand Earth Observation System (Theos) Development Program
The program is developed by Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (Public Organization) (GISTDA) under the Ministry of Science and Technology, with European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company – Astrium (EADS Astrium SAS), in France, as a prime contractor. It consists of design, development, test, launch, and commissioning phases of THEOS satellite, as well as integration with ...
