Building a Bridge to the Future

The challenges of the environment and of settling space are not in conflict. They are part of the same task of preserving both humanity and the biosphere.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. We are adding CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere as a side-effect of our industrial wealth creation, and this is increasing the global temperature with potentially disastrous results in the long term. Often, I see those concerned with this problem disparaging space travel, and especially space colonisation, with an argument along the lines of “We should fix this planet first”.

I personally do not believe this is a valid dichotomy. As I discussed in an earlier post, sending people into space as permanent colonists is a slight reduction in carbon dioxide emissions due to their future lifetime emissions being greater than the emissions of launching them. In the longer term, space releases us from any energy or raw material constraints for the foreseeable future, by detaching our industry from the biosphere and providing abundant material resources. The total power output of the Sun is a factor of 2 billion larger than the amount re…