I like reading about human beings venturing to remote and expensive places. The five most powerful words in the English language were broadcast from the pulpit of the old St Paul's Cathedral by the pugnacious Dean of old - John Donne. Every time I hear those words they have the power of a fully-loaded Boeing 747 roaring up from the tarmac with the spine-tingling near-terror of unshaking human conviction: No man is an island.
Of course the world should care about such things as Fiji’s military coup, poor Tongans voting in their first election, tsunamis in Samoa and Papua New Guinea, and Australia’s peacekeeping mission in the Solomons. They are all pennies where other nations count themselves as pounds. But our Earth itself is a remote atoll in an unusually quiet part of the universe. We ought not to indulge ourselves in the arrogant contemplation of ourselves as if we were alone. No planet is an island.