Guest View: Despite space flight, there is no Planet B – The Register-Guard

About 30 years ago, controversy raged in the Pacific Northwest over forestry practices on public lands. A bumper sticker popular among loggers played on the name of a radical environmental group. Earth First! the bumper sticker read. Well log the other planets later.

Fast forward about a third of a century. Our forest controversies are no longer nationally prominent, even as climate change brings new threats. Partly this is because annual timber harvest from federal lands in Oregon fell more than 80% on average from the 1970s to the 2010s. Also, employment in Oregons forest products industry has roughly halved since the late 1980s, while the tech sector has mushroomed. The burgeoning community of tech firms from Amazon, Microsoft and others in Seattle to start-ups in Portland and numerous others around San Francisco are now sometimes described as parts of a tech innovation ecosystem.

A number of billionaires spawned by the ever-growing tech sector are captivated by space travel. One of the most successful is Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, a space technology and service firm in 2000. Another is Elon Musk, who founded rival SpaceX in California in 2002.

In an extraordinary win for SpaceX on May 30, it successfully launched a rocket carrying two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. This was the first time astronauts blasted off from U.S. soil since 2011. It was also the first-ever launch of NASA astronauts by a private company. And this achievement came on the heels of NASAs April 30 selection of SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop a vehicle to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. (Alabama-based Dynetics also was chosen.) Part of the purpose of the moon mission is to help clear the way for the first human to visit Mars in subsequent years.

But for Bezos, Musk and many of their fellow (would-be space) travelers, any such giant leaps are pedestrian compared to their astronomical aspirations. And while Bezos and Musk advocate different space goals, they have much in common. Bezos would use extraterrestrial mines to create giant artificial space structures where a trillion humans could live in the coming centuries with boundless material abundance. Musk is focused on permanently colonizing Mars, in part so that humans would have a refuge in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.

On the surface, either vision may seem environmentally benevolent. Any kind of space colony supported by extraterrestrial mining could relieve pressure on Earths resources. Yet space colonization ambitions are disturbing given the current trajectory of what Buckminster Fuller (and others) called Spaceship Earth.

In the Pacific Northwest, climate change is making millions of acres of forest increasingly vulnerable to pests, drought and catastrophic fires. Similar challenges exist worldwide. SpaceXs May 30 flight launched from Floridas Kennedy Space Center, which faces increasing risk of chronic flooding due to climate-change-induced sea level rise. In this light, it is as if todays space pioneers have adopted the old logging slogan but in a literal way the loggers never intended. Later is here, and its time to log the other planets.

What technology visionaries seem to miss is that the problem of the environment is not primarily a problem of technology. Of course technology can enable positive change. Musk has shown this with Tesla, his other main venture that is revolutionizing electric vehicles, batteries and solar energy systems. But at its core, the problem of the environment is a problem of ethics. It is about accepting that the most important choices of mortal humans inherently involve limits and trade-offs. Admittedly, there is something admirable and human about resisting such limits. But too much resistance risks hubris, which can quickly eclipse our respect for the value of living systems larger than ourselves.

Todays most ardent rocket boosters may be right that other planets have exploitable material resources. And Mars may even be made to support human life in artificial bubbles. But what good is that? One thing we can never innovate or disrupt our way out of is the imperative to respect and protect the finite planetary home whose munificent habitability we currently enjoy. As contemporary climate protesters put it, in a fitting-if-unwitting rejoinder to the old loggers bumper sticker, There is no Planet B.

Alex Roth is a senior financial analyst and attorney. He lives in Portland.

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Guest View: Despite space flight, there is no Planet B - The Register-Guard