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Climate Change and action - a wider perspective
- Michael H Martin-Smith (1 December 2007)
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Michael H Martin-Smith, 1/retired GP principal2/member Space Education Council UK HU5 3EU
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Your leader on Climate Change and Public Health rightly notes that there have been 5 Mass Extinction events in the ages following the Cambrian, including that of the dinosaurs by Extraterrestrial impact. The Permian event has not been pinned down yet, but is widely attributed to either cosmic Impact or the Siberian Volcanic Trap eruption. The linkage of the two,in which an impact is held to have triggered an unstable crust to erupt( as with the Caloris Imapct basin on the planet Mercury),is another possible cause ( cf my article in Geology Today, summer 2001). For the future, impacts by a new long period comet, or asteroid, are still possible with only a few months' notice (cf Comet Shoemaker Levy 9's spectacular visit to Jupiter in 1994). More speculative are Gamma Ray Bursts from nearby hypernovas ,or neutron star collisions, and supervolcanos such as that promised at Yellowstone National Park. The point of all this is that there is no purely "Green" way to ensure human survival and evolution in the face of these events - only an enhanced programme of astronautical science and technology could enable us to transcend these; if we become being dispersed before such terminal events, we survive and evolve to our fuller potential. If we do not,we become extinct, period. Such events are stochastic, and so unlikely to warn us in time to put an enduring E-T civilisation in place; such an Diaspora into Space will, also take many generations. For now, we have a 50 years' start. We should build on it while we can still read, write, and invent! There are clearly many reasons to move away from fossil fuels( Messrs Putin and Ahmadinejad, and foreseeable exhaustion and possibly nuclear conflict being but some)- but we must avoid the threat of throwing away our technological capabilities, our relatively capable civilisation, and our freedoms out of misplaced guilt. Hair shirts do not save lives - but wise investment in physical capabilies often do. We do not need hyper-regulation and taxation to overcome the threat of Climate change - rather, a flowering of ingenuity, exploration, and a free market based on an appeal to enlightened self-interest and human curiosity. As it is, the much touted of "Cure" of Tax and Tyranny is likely to prove worse than the complaint... Even if it is eventually shown that the relationship between solar cycles, cloud formation , galactic charged particles,our van Allen Belts, and the atmosphere is tighter than that been our carbon emissions and climate, we will not have acted in vain if we adopt an expansionary extraterrestrial position - for the persisting wider extinction threats will have been addressed,and we will have gained,in time, dozens of new worlds. Two possible clean renewable major sources of energy for coming decades are solar power satellites, and Helium 3 based nuclear fusion plants. Both require that we build a space-based economy for their economic realisation. If we follow usual British practice of ignoring space technology in favour of "solving our earthly problems first", Mother Nature will reward us with a well deserved extinction, while India, China, and Japan inherit the future. Mankind at its best does not "solve" the big problems - we transcend them by enlarging our envelope so as to render them irrelevant. We should respond to global warming in such a way as to extend our ecological range and capacities using our innate traits of curiosty ,ingenuity, and constructive ocpportunism - or become extinct . Only a serious misanthrope could keep us earthbound in pursuit of the latter future! Planet Earth is not in danger - she has survived worse,as long as the Sun remains on the Main Seqence; but human civilisation is. We must therefore act in its interests, and if we want to nurture it we must extend it into new ecospheres, based on playing to human nature,not suppressing it. Our marine ancestors once did no less in their way...the solar system is no more hostile to us than Dry Land was to the Crossopterygians of an earlier Age. Meanwhile, for a hopeful Christmas, may I reveal that within 2-3 years we are likely to have the first pictures of Earthlike exoplanets, and the first demonstration of a feasible future interstellar propulsion technology - more on this nearer the time. Watch this Space! Competing interests: Member of Space Education Council,UK |
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