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Investing in further scientific exploration of space is a waste of resources
By Robin Hanbury-Tenison. Published Sunday, January 1, 2017. E&T (Engineering and Technology)
The amount of money being spent on space research is in the billions and it has achieved extraordinarily little except for a bit of improved technology which would probably have come about anyway by other means. Whether or not global warming is real, and whether or not we are facing imminent catastrophe on this planet, we are certainly facing serious issues here on Earth, and they are getting worse as we simply watch them. These include the disappearance of the rainforest, the pollution of the oceans, and increased desertification of an area about the size of England every year. These are the general crises that are coming to the planet, quite apart from the economic ones we’re so obsessed with at the moment.
I have for some time considered space research a gross waste of money, time and effort that could be much better applied to the management of our own planet. I’m currently writing a book about what remains of the Central American rainforest of the Petén and looking at ways of protecting it. But the only way you can really protect rainforest, and I’ve been trying to do this for 40 years, is to make it more valuable standing than cut. The Petén is interesting because this is where the Maya were. Their civilisation collapsed in about 900AD because they over-exploited their environment.
We know that all civilisations collapse after about 500 years, prior to which you have big cities, people in the countryside servicing the cities. But inevitably the greed of development leads to the extinction of a culture. This is exactly what is happening to us today. We’re experiencing climate change, famine, drought, warfare and we’re investing money needed to solve these problems in Space.
If the collapse of civilisations is a recurrent theme, then at we should be looking for ways of managing the planet’s resources in order to make how we live sustainable. The way to do that is not to go charging off into Space, wasting unbelievable quantities of money in pursuit of some chimera that we might in one day come back with some valuable mineral. Science should be devoting the sorts of sums of money that it is pumping into space to working out how to mange the climate here on Earth.
There has been research going on for 65 years into climate management. We know how to seed clouds and we know how to make it rain when we want it to rain. The Chinese and the Russians
are very switched on to this and they know how to do it. The Chinese used it to prevent rain during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, and it never rains on the Victory Day Parade in Russia. So the technology for managing the weather is in place and I think we should devote massive resources to developing that technology and taking it from the military into the civilian world.
The big elephant in the room in all this is the issue of population. We all know it will rise to 10 billion or so in the next few decades. The only way to reduce population is prosperity, because we prosperous countries do not breed so fast. The way to do that is to give people enough to eat. The way to do that is to make it rain. We should reallocate the funds currently being spent on Space research to the rather simple notion of making it rain where and when we want it.
Now there will be pro-space lobbyists who agree with every word of this, but will complain that I want to take their money off them. But there isn’t enough money to go around. In terms of expenditure on weather management since the Second World War there’s only been tens of millions spent on research – as opposed to tens of billions on space research.
If you put the money that is wasted in space into the hands of climatologists you could have lasting benefits for mankind. I don’t think space science is bad science, I just think it’s a waste of time.