The glimmer of hope, that everyone needs ...

OK ... its been a while since I wrote anything. It seems like its a trend, every year, when November arrives, I would have neither the time nor ideas to write about. However, these couple of months were quite eventful. From making some really good friends over here in Guildford, to my friends from Malta coming over to visit and last but not least, Graduation weekend, it was a crazy couple of months. I'll talk about what happened to me in another post soon enough, however, there is other stuff that happened on Earth in the past few months, that is a bit more deserving of attention, rather than my partying adventures in the last couple of months.

On the 12th of Nov, t'was a beautiful morning. And even though the temperature was freezing, the sun was shining brightly ... and millions of kilometres away, a small satellite with the name, Rosetta, was orbiting a comet while her "daughter", Philae, had just landed on a comet's surface. Yes, a frikkin' comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko! Forty five years ago, a famous man said the words "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Of course, we all know who that was, Neil Armstrong as humanity stepped for the first time on the surface of the moon. In my opinion, Philae's landing on the comet's surface was the greatest technological achievement mankind achieved since the manned landings on the surface of the moon. 

Rosetta's Lander, Philae, on its descent to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

And yet, instead of acknowledging the progress of science, the media decided to focus on a "sexist" t-shirt, that one brilliant man was wearing. A t-shirt, that was designed and given to him by his friend, female friend, to promote her new clothing line. And sadly enough, while technology and science make huge strides in our hemi-sphere, on other parts of the world, humanity is still fighting wars and killing thousands of innocent people everyday, while others die of hunger poverty and disease. 

An example is slavery, which is still being practised in the 21st century, who would have believed that up to a few years ago? However, nowadays you can take a simple look at Syria and Iraq, where ISIS have even published instructions on how to treat women slaves and how to have sex with them, as reported in the following CNN article: ISIS justifies female slavery. Is it really 2014? Because it feels like its still something right out of the 14th century! And not to talk about the  ever increasing list of hostages that were murdered by ISIS since James Foley.  

And so many more things happened. December came, and with it, a siege on a small cafe` in downtown Sydney, where an armed man held all the people hostage for more than 16 hours. Thankfully, he was eventually killed by the authorities, but not before he had killed two of the hostages. Following that came the crash of the Russian Rouble, which in just a matter of  a few weeks, its value was halved when compared to the US Dollar, due to lower oil prices and sanctions on Russia because of its actions in South Eastern Ukraine. And if Russia were to collapse economically, the impact would be felt globally, and everyone would suffer  the consequences.

Sadly, all of that is not even the tip of the ice-berg! Whenever and which ever news agency website one were to take a look at, rarely one ever sees any good news any more. Its always about economic uncertainty, political instability and corruption, terrorism, migration and the waging of wars. And amongst all of this, Rosetta and Philae, as small and as far away as they are, they were one of the only few good news of the year, shining some hope on what seems to be a dark year for planet Earth.