Space Travel To Save The Human Species Could Destroy The Planet – Intelligent Living

Companies including Elon Musks SpaceX, Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, and Space Adventures aim to make space tourism more common. People are already buying tickets. Some are calling this collection of competing companies the billionaire space race.

On July 5, Virgin Galactic took Richard Branson roughly 86 km up into space. Shortly after, on July 20, Blue Origin flew Bezos into space.

Branson said shortly after his flight:

Were here to make space more accessible to all. Welcome to the dawn of a new space age.

Bezos said in an announcement on Instagram before the trip:

Ever since I was five years old, Ive dreamed of traveling to space.

Meanwhile, Musks ambitions for space travel revolve around making humans an interplanetary species. The point is to preserve humankind for millions of years to come in case Earth is destroyed with a colony on Mars and eventually beyond.

However, widespread rocket launches come with a considerable cost to the environment.

Associate professor Eloise Marais, who teaches physical geography at University College London, told The Guardian:

For one long-haul plane flight, its one to three tons of carbon dioxide [per passenger]. One rocket launch, in contrast, produces about 200-300 tons for a flight of around four passengers.

Furthermore, the emissions are emitted into the upper atmosphere and remain there for two to three years.

Marais said:

Even water injected into the upper atmosphere where it can form clouds can have warming impacts. Even something as seemingly innocuous as water can have an effect.

Meanwhile, the fuels emit massive amounts of heat at ground level, potentially adding ozone to the troposphere where it retains heat like a greenhouse gas. Plus, fuels like kerosene and methane also produce soot and other harmful gases in addition to carbon dioxide, which can end up harming the ozone layer.

Last year, Jessica Dallas, a New Zealand Space Agency senior policy adviser, wrote in an analysis of research on space launch emissions:

While several environmental impacts are resulting from the launch of space vehicles, the depletion of stratospheric ozone is the most studied and most immediately concerning.

As you can imagine, rockets burn an obscene amount of fuel to make it out of the Earths atmosphere and escape gravity. Thats a heavy price to pay for billionaires to experience a few fleeting minutes of weightlessness.

Many people are outraged at the idea of people like Branson and Bezos getting to spend a handful of luxurious minutes falling weightlessly back down to Earth with their friends and family. Yet, at the same time, back on Earth, wildfires rage on, residents nail shutters on their windows in preparation for another turbulent hurricane season, and doctors intubated COVID-19 patients. These people argue that the billionaires are primarily responsible for the climate crisis and should be using their considerable resources to fight Earths accelerating environmental problems instead of taking day trips into space.

Robert Reich, the former US Labor Secretary, recently tweeted:

Is anyone else alarmed that billionaires are having their private space race while record-breaking heatwaves are sparking a fire-breathing dragon of clouds and cooking sea creatures to death in their shells?

Its no surprise to hear that humanity faces an uphill battle to ensure the survival of future generations on this planet. 2021 has already seen the highest temperatures ever recorded in some places, with brutal climate change-linked heatwaves causing hundreds of preventable deaths.

Fortunately, rocket launches are still relatively low on the global-scale polluter list. For example, NASA said only 114 rockets attempted to reach orbit in 2020, compared to 100,000 planes taking off, on average, per day. But soon enough, space tourism will hit its stride, with costs of space launches dropping year after year.

Marais urges caution as the space tourism industry grows. She says there are currently no international rules regarding the kinds of fuels used and their impact on the environment.She said:

We have no regulations currently around rocket emissions. The time to act is now while the billionaires are still buying their tickets.

Still, Musk argues against the view that billionaires are wasting their time and money trying to explore space while failing to fix Earths many problems.

He tweeted:

Those who attack space maybe they dont realize that space represents hope for so many people.

Various existential risks threaten to decimate humanity and the earthly biosphere. These threats have compelled many brilliant people, like Musk, to consider how best to avoid the potential catastrophes and complete antihalation of our species. They want to ensure that our evolutionary branch will persist and space travel is part of the answer. Thus, its a necessary feat to colonize Mars as a backup planet.

In an interview with Aeon, Musk said the following of his Mars colonization plans:

I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary, for safeguarding the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant because humanity would be extinct. It would be like, Good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there arent any humans left.

Not everyone loves humanity. Some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the Earths surface, either explicitly or implicitly. They say things like, Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around. They imply that humanity and civilization are less good than their absence. But Im not in that school. I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.

Another advocate is software engineer, inventor, and global resilience guru Vinay Gupta. In an interview with Vice, Gupta said:

Making life interplanetary, and then interstellar enables creation to generate untold wonders over potentially trillions of years. We have no idea how long human life could last if we can get it off this one fragile, risk-filled, tiny sphere into the ocean of darkness and light above our heads and every nook and cranny of the observable sphere. We owe all the potential futures that could emerge from our present the possibility of existence, and to accomplish this, we must go not only into space but eventually, by any means found necessary, into the stars.

Backing up these genius minds, a fascinating Futurism article reads:

For all we know at this time, Earth has given rise to the most sophisticated life-forms in the universe. Our present body of scientific evidence suggests that there is no more promising branch of evolution than our own. If allowed to continue, our earthly branch will almost certainly give rise to multiferous untold wondersinconceivably complex expressions of human and post-human life and technology. Moreover, if it persists, our branch of evolution may well result in intergalactic civilizations of superintelligent beings, which we cannot presently fathom.

And so the thesis goes as follows: If we think there is a value (to the cosmos) in allowing our branch of evolution to continue to blossom and complexify in whatever ways it may, then we need to make damn sure not to sever this branch of evolution prematurely.

The speaker argued that our present historical moment is a crucial juncture in the unfolding story of the universe because we now have the power to end all life on Earth.

We possess thousands of nuclear warheads capable of occasioning an existential catastrophe, and we are at the liberty of a fairly fragile global ecosystem with limited resources. Beyond that, our being confined to this single planet means that a single asteroid collision or some other unforeseen cataclysmic event could wipe out our entire species and potentially all intelligent life on Earth.

But, bringing this story back to the topic of climate change: A single SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket burns approximately 400 metric tons of kerosene, emitting more greenhouse gas emissions in a few minutes than an average car would in over 200 years! So, does space really represent hope for people like Musk argues?

As Marianne Williamson, failed presidential candidate and new age guru, put it in her reply to Musks Twitter post:

The problem is that Earth represents hopelessness for so many more.

Its a controversial topic for sure. Especially since people are dying from climate change-induced heat and disasters now, but the Mars salvation plan might not even be fully realized in our lifetime.

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Space Travel To Save The Human Species Could Destroy The Planet - Intelligent Living