Could space exploration bring a solution to Earth's climate problems?

It’s only in the last century that we truly finished our exploration of all the corners of Earth. It’s only been around 7000 years since the first of us decided to sit still and settle in cities. We are, by nature, a restless species.

We even dared to reach for the stars in the 60s and 70s - venturing into space, stepping onto the Moon. Yet since the 80s, cost put our grandest dream on hold.

In that same period, we’ve trashed our planet at a suicidal rate. In 1969, when Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins went to the Moon, there were 3.6 billion people on Earth. Today, there’s nearly 8 billion of us.

You don’t need to be an environmental evangelist to see human life in danger around the world from the destruction we’ve wrought through climate change. This summer alone has proved a salutary moment to take stock of what we’ve done: human life lost through heatwaves, floods and fires across the world, habitats destroyed, wildlife decimated. The Amazon rainforest - our planet’s lungs - now emits more carbon dioxide that it absorbs. The Siberian permafrost - loaded with Co2 - is melting. In Turkey, tourists flee from resorts ringed by wildfires. Last week, humankind used up our entire quota of the world’s resources for 2021 with almost half the year still to go.

It’s becoming all but impossible to believe that political leaders have the brains or guts to prevent the climate crisis spiralling completely out of control. We’ll soon reach the point of no return. What then? How do we live in a house when the roof is burning?

Could our hereditary need to explore once more be our means to survival? Could venturing into space - pioneering the Moon, perhaps even Mars, be part of the toolkit to save the species here on Earth?

Climate change manifested itself in the form of flooding in Europe this summer

Space exploration is now returning centre stage. We’ve seen, in recent weeks, the rich men of the world venture beyond Earth’s limits. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos flew into space, half out of hubris and half out of greed as they hope to monetise space for tourism. Elon Musk hovers behind them intent on a corporate takeover of space exploration.

We can’t leave the domain of space to the world’s super-rich. Allow them their pet projects, but the next steps on humanity’s great journey of exploration must be in the hands of the people, through our governments. But credit where credit is due – at least these ruthless tycoons have shown us that a return to space is possible for humanity.

China, Russia and America are busily weaponising space. Beijing and Moscow have planned a joint Moon base. It’s the stuff of science fiction but it’s happening. Nasa says astronauts will return to the Moon by 2024 with the intention of building a base camp.

Could pioneering our nearest neighbour, the Moon, be a means of addressing Earth’s intolerable population problem? If our rapacious appetite for resources must always be sated, might those destructive needs not be better met on an unpopulated planet?

It feels like an admission of defeat to even dare suggest that we should tackle humanity’s environmental problems by seeking to leave Earth, but who amongst us any more really believes that what’s happening to the climate can be arrested in time? The environment is my greatest concern – but I no longer have faith in the promises of politicians. I fear the coming UN climate summit in Glasgow, COP26, will be a greenwashed talking shop.

Read more: could colonisation of space change humanity for the better?

Clearly, there are environmental concerns with space exploration – those big rockets need fuel. But just as the fuel for cars, boats and planes is being greened, so too is fuel for spacecraft.

Space exploration gives us an edge when it comes to studying climate change. All those satellites shooting off from space ports around the world (we’ll soon have one here in Scotland based in Sutherland, with plans for a first launch next year) allow us to monitor the decline of the climate from space in ways impossible here on Earth.

It was space exploration which really created the modern Green movement. When US astronaut William Anders took his famous snapshot of Earth rising above the lunar surface while orbiting the moon in 1968, humanity was given a glimpse of its own fragility for the first time. The picture spawned Earth Day in 1970, switching on a generation to environmental politics.

Only the most pessimistic amongst us would say that it’s a mad dream to one day imagine that human beings will live elsewhere in the solar system. That mobile phone in your pocket connects you to almost every person on Earth and contains the entire sum of human knowledge. Our ingenuity is boundless, if dangerous.

Could we harness that ingenuity of ours in a way that allows us to use space to alleviate the pressures of the climate crisis? Clearly it’s a possibility. None of this means we slow down the fight against climate change. Quite the reverse. We need to up the pace. But space is – or could be – a significant part of the solution.

We don’t need to build a lifeboat and abandon the planet wholesale, but space exploration is an inevitability, so why not couple those urges of ours to pioneer and invent, with the desperate demands of survival in the age of climate catastrophe? Humanity needs room to breathe – literally and metaphorically. Perhaps, we need to do what our ancient ancestors did: identify an horizon, summon our courage, and go.

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