To think millions of litres of fuel shouldn't be wasted on sending a rocket to the moon

Okay? And? So we just never do anything because it might cause a damage elsewhere?

Humans may be wonderful with their inventions etc but we always seem to leave a trail of destruction behind us as well, which we then have to find new ways to sort out

@ArtemisMission and that's what I am saying the technology for that has caused problems for this planet, so the concern is that we are going to create problems in space with new technology when we explore space

Driving a car, flying and heating your home all cause pollution as well.

The article I posted above says it is causing issues.

@ArtemisMission do you think there are no bad implications to space technology, everything will be rosy and have no negative impact anywhere. That we won't be having to think of new technologies to remedy any damage

Someone purely logical and less compassionate might suggest that continuing to power the “brains” of those who hold such views was a large waste of precious and limited power supplies available with current technology.

Imagine being baffled by this ‘space stuff’ or think space exploration, research and all the things that have and will come from it are a waste of brainpower! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Nuclear fusion isn’t about developing weapons.

It would be a source of bountiful, clean energy so that there was plenty for everyone on Earth.

Therefore, halt most of the wars which are about resources, primarily energy. Once there is abundant clean energy pretty much all other problems go away in terms of food, water processing, preserving the natural environment, being able to farm enough food in much smaller areas with little strain on natural resources and rewilding large areas of the planet, etc.

The zombies clearly don’t grasp this though. “Science is bad, m’kay?” 🙄

Again. The industrial revolution brought forth massive poverty reduction due to the increased availability of energy. Global living standards are so much better than they were before.

Why go to space? To quote a friend:

’Cos it’s next. Cos we came out of the cave, we looked over the hill and we saw fire, and we crossed the ocean and pioneered the west, and we look to the sky. The history of man is hung on a lifetime of exploration and this is what is next’

Again they need the energy. Especially India. Fuel poverty is a thing. They can't afford all the renewables. Weapons are there for defense.

Both economies have had a lowering emission intensity over time. Both have investments in renewables as well.

Again why do you think this "new space technology" (which has been around for a while) will "cause issues"?

Do you have GCSEs in science?

@ProjectHailMary I'm not for science developing weapons. Nuclear power/nuclear weapons. Not all science is good.

China/India getting rich due to technology but fucking up the planet, so new technology has to be found to sort that out. So how do we know this new space technology isn't causing issues which we will then need to develop new technology to sort out.

I’m sure all of these anti-science posters will completely eschew the cheap and clean nuclear fusion power that the evil scientists are currently developing, because science is evil and “a waste of brain power”.

❤️

Nuclear power is thataway ---->

All countries needed to and will still need to use fossil fuels. We need energy

And how does this compare to the pollution caused by dropping $100bn worth of weapons in the Middle East in the last couple of months?

Let’s see an analysis of the pollution caused by space launches in comparison to total global emissions, and the emissions caused by producing and then using the weapons being used globally to attack each other, so that we can assess their scale and whether they are worthwhile.

Then let’s consider which is acceptable or not, in the context of what it does to advance human progress and the technologies that can actually help us to prevent further harm to the Earth and all the species which inhabit it.

If the US wasn't spending money on the moon, it would have more money to spend on war.

The culprits are countries getting richer. The West in the 19th and 20th centuries and India and China now.

Technology is what allowed those countries to get richer, and is what has allowed rich countries to become cleaner.

Per-capita emissions in the West are falling pretty fast.

As Matt Damon’s character in The Martian said, we need to “science the shit out of it”.

And as Ryan Gosling’s character in Project Hail Mary (reportedly) said to the leading scientist in his field, some people are a “staggering waste of carbon”. 😆

Some of the comments on this thread have been so depressingly stupid that I think I’d quite like to go to live with Dr Ryland Grace on Irid where things seem to be more sane.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/22/scientists-call-for-action-air-pollution-space-launches

A huge waste of brain power…

Jesus Christ. Not like OP can talk.

Nobody is saying they don’t. But their struggles would be a hell of a lot worse without any technology, healthcare, etc.

Mass scale exploitation of natural resources before the implications were understood and continuation of this for political and economic reasons is causing great suffering, as is uneven distribution of resources. Yet without all of those scientific advances your life and the lives of the poorest on Earth would be far, far worse.

I highly doubt, also, that the santimonious posters on this thread would like to see an even distribution of current human resources across the globe because that would involve their own living standards and those of their families being vastly curtailed for a couple of generations. This is why politicians will not cooperate on this but that doesn’t make science “bad”. Science is the only solution to those problems and we should be investing far MORE in it.

Look at it positively: we use technology to solve our big problems. That creates new problems, usually smaller ones, which we then solve

There are existential risks, I agree, which is where my story may finally fall down. But until that point, our quality of life has been immeasurably improved. And had we not had technology we would face a different set of existential risks, not no risks.

Not to mention the fact that eventually an asteroid too large to repel may come directly at the Earth (likely to happen long before the Sun dies, statistically) so any species living only on one planet will have a limited lifespan.

The difference between us developing interstellar travel before we wipe ourselves out on Earth/ a space object wipes us out, or not, will be the factor that determines whether the human race survives in some form for billions of years or is gone in what — in terms of the timescales of the universe — is the blink of an eye from when it first evolved.