"Friendly" Planet?

I was introduced to, and immersed myself in, science fiction books back in the late '60s through, oh, somewhere in the '90s, I guess. That of course included the old masters, writing from back in the '40s and on up. I relished having my assumptions challenged by new worlds, new species, new problems and their solutions. My mind expanded. Boggled, too, but that was a good thing.

There was one theme that ran through a huge number of books I read in those days. (Perhaps it still does, but I'm into a lot of other things these days and wouldn't know.) Space travel was the big thing. We would explore and colonize other planets, grow interstellar cultures. We'd find all these other friendly planets, maybe solve an adjustment problem or two, and settle in. Or maybe a previous exploratory colony ship would hit that one insurmountable problem that nobody expected and get wiped out, leaving the next colony ship to land and figure it all out.

What fun!

These books would explore faster than light travel, or the consequences of not having it and what could go wrong with a multi-generations ship. We'd meet other cultures, figure out why they were intelligent though very different from us, make friends or enemies, and sometimes get invaded ourselves.

Underlying all these different adventures was one basic assumption, both stupid and erroneous. We'd be looking for a friendly planet, just like the one we'd left behind.

What friendly planet? I don't mean that old mathematical theory about how many billion of the right kind of stars with how many billion of the right kind of planet kind of idea. Hey, it's got appeal. I get it. But just where is this so-called friendly planet we're living on now?

Yes, I know that we've been successful at spreading our species, 7 billion plus, into nearly every nook and cranny on the globe. That means we're an adaptable species, not that we're living on a so-called friendly planet. Sure, there are a couple of things going for us. The atmosphere has a pretty decent amount of oxygen and not too many toxins in it, though we're working on that. It's got temperature ranges we can comfortably adapt to, or even not so comfortably. There's plenty of water. The other flora and fauna, for a big part, are edible enough to sustain our bodily needs.

All that is the stuff of a desirable colony planet, and way too many authors have stopped there in developing the ecosystems, weather, geography, and what have you in our supposed new homes.

But how on earth did we survive on this planet? Pretty much everything here is trying to kill us. And often does.

First, we're not stable. Our surface challenges us with earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, quicksand, too much or too little water, fires, blizzards, heat waves, extreme winds, lightning, rock slides, mudslides, avalanches... and that's just the surface.

Our food supply can be deadly, whether a poisonous berry, a nut that needs cooking before eating, a predator that wants to eat us first, or some small little snake or bug that just wants to stay alive by sacrificing a few to teach us to avoid the many. Heck! Have you noticed we haven't even figured out the mosquito yet?

That doesn't begin to cover the microscopic threats, all the fungi, bacteria, viruses, prions, and parasites whose only goal is to destroy us. Not all of us, mind you, leaving just enough behind that we can multiply again before they launch their next attack.

Let us not forget what a splendid job we are doing of killing off each other, as if all these other challenges weren't enough.

We all know all this. Yet we think of this as a friendly planet to our species. And try to imagine there are other planets out there in space that can be "friendly" homes for us?

Who are we kidding?