LETTER: The agents of our own destruction

My partner and I are back from our first Sphere experience, a 50-minute high-tech video production designed to showcase the all-embracing pictures for which that the building was designed. It was called “Postcard from Earth.” And like some rides in certain theme parks, our seats sometimes rocked to the sounds on the screen. All of that scored an 8 on my 10-point scale of spectacular. I loved the giant closeup of the elephant.

But wait, there’s more.

The storyline was about the Earth as Mother Nature, sustaining us as we loved her. We wrote songs to her, built cathedrals in gratitude and reverence. Until we didn’t, and she couldn’t. We built high and dug deep. Our structures crumbled. Earth flooded and burned. The video shows the lights going out on Earth, in particular in the United States. Citizens of Earth fled to another place in space. A space-suited man and woman emerge, light years later, on a barren, rocky terrain — a modern Adam and Eve, to multiply and fill this distant land. The land turns green, almost Earth-like. And Earth itself, freed of us, is shown in recovery. New life blooms there in our absence.

Now the irony: This message confronts an audience gathered in the most energy-consumptive city in the United States. Each of us — including my partner and I — are agents of our own destruction by buying into this entertainment. My guess is that this irony is lost on most of us. After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

So I ask the producers of this video: What exactly did you expect beyond the video entertainment value of your project? So much invested in an editorial that, in my view, falls on deaf ears.