On a long, boring drive recently, traveling where the radio ceases to carry anything but country music and evangelical preaching, I thanked whatever gods may be for the podcast and dialed up a “Fresh Air” to keep my brain alive. The guest was Kevin Fong, a physician and author of the book “Extreme Medicine.”

He should know. As the co-director of the Centre for Aviation Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at University College London, he has consulted with NASA and with deep sea explorers. Yet his central premise seems to be that man is unfit for anywhere other than at or near sea level on planet Earth.

Yes, we have engineered ways to climb Everest, fly into space, dive a few dozen meters under the sea, but all such forays are doomed to be brief, are almost always bad for our health and frequently fatal. We have not evolved for extreme environments, but for the surface of our planet and for a brief span of years. No amount of wishful thinking and Imagineering is going to change our nature.

This is bad news for those who think we are destined to head for Mars or distant stars, to populate Atlantean undersea cities or survive the toxic terrestrial environment our own meddling is creating. Not gonna happen. Like mayflies we have our habitat and our moment, and then are gone. The robots may conquer the stars, and creepy bio-engineered offshoots of our species may be hatched to outlive us, but for now there are narrow limits within which we can survive and thrive.

I, for one, am perfectly content with that. I don’t want to experience nitrogen narcosis or the bends. I’ll stuck with my snorkel whose worst side effect is siphoning water up my nose. Clearly, trying to scuba would do me in. I also get a roaring headache when I ride a gondola or drive up something as tall as Pike’s Peak or Chamonix. Good. Lesson learned. I won’t go there. It’s all just rocks and ice anyway. Who needs that? In fact, humans probably invented skiing to get down from such places as fast as possible and back to a habitable elevation.

Given my northern European ancestry, venturing out in the direct sunlight is also risky business. I was clearly intended by nature for some overcast place like Scotland, Ireland or Seattle. Only mad dogs and Englishmen slathered with sunblock and robed from head to toe like Lawrence of Arabia go out in the noonday sun. Pale faces are best advised to cower indoors until the sun sinks in the west.

Indeed much of nature seems to be plotting against me. In my later years I have acquired allergies that appear to dictate that half the seasons are off limits. The sex life of plants is as disagreeable to my sinuses as the sex life of humans is to various fundamentalist religious sects.

Realistically, humans are not intended to travel faster that a dog trot. Cars have killed more of us than all the wars in our nation’s history put together, airbags and seat belts notwithstanding. Boats were probably relatively safe before they had motors and were restricted to placid lakes. How many canoe deaths could there have been among the Iroquois? But humans always want to go higher, faster, crazier. It rarely ends well.

Put out to sea or miss a weather forecast and you are sunk. Cruise ships which are designed to be placid tubs have a way of ending up adrift or upside down. And if you survive the voyage, there’s the buffet waiting to kill you. Ferries regularly founder. And how about submarines? As a kid I loved films like “Run Silent, Run Deep,” “Torpedo Run,” and “The Enemy Below.” But in the same way I loved space operas like “Forbidden Planet.” Great escapist entertainment at a Saturday matinee, but actually getting on an undersea vessel is just asking for trouble.

Contorting your flesh to fit the inhuman contours of an airline seat is also a masochistic endeavor, bad for the knees and back, not to mention the risk of thrombosis from being locked in a stress position for hours or the diseases waiting to pounce when you breath recirculated air laden with the germs of several hundred wayfarers from God knows what hot zone. All in all, modern air travel is a cross between being confined to an Iron Maiden and a petri dish. And that doesn’t even take into account the risk of being flown at 300 miles an hour into an Alp by a terrorist or troubled Teuton. We are built to withstand none of this.

Just venturing outside our front door exposes us vile toxins we have introduced into the air and soil. And don’t drink the water. A trip to the supermarket is equally terrifying, what with the antibiotics in the poultry, the formaldehyde in the fish, the mad cow in the beef, the listeria in the lettuce and the ice cream. If your listen to the litany of fatal side effects lurking in a single pill of Viagra, Lunesta or Enbrel you’ll never darken Walgreen’s door again. And hospitals lie in wait to infect the unwary with flesh-eating bacteria, drug resistant TB, CRE, MRSA, staph, or C. dif.

So the answer appears to be, stay home. But now we are warned that even watching TV for more than an hour can now kill us. Instead we should be doing nonstop lunges, squats and planks. No thanks. Thoreau asked, “What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” Good question, Henry David. Being an earthling is no picnic, but as Kevin Fong reminds us, there’s no alternative. About all we can do is hang on, and sing along with Kander and Ebb.
“Somebody loses, and somebody wins,
And one day it’s kicks,
Then it’s kicks in the shins,
But the planet spins
And world goes round and round.”