14 DAY TRIAL // A recent article published on LiveScience made me really ponder on the possibility of actually leaving our planet at some point and heading towards other worlds that would house us, at least for a while. Citing this year's issue of the Living Planet Report by the World Wildlife Federation, the author of the article underlines the dire conjuncture the human race has brought upon itself and offers solutions literally taken out of classic Sci-Fi books such as Asimov's “Foundation” or Niven's “Ringworld”.
Here's the excerpt from the report, “The Earth’s biocapacity is the amount of biologically productive area – cropland, pasture, forest, and fisheries – that is available to meet humanity’s needs. Since the late 1980s, we have been in overshoot - the Ecological Footprint has exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity – by about 25%. Effectively, the Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand – people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources. A moderate business-as-usual scenario, based on United Nations projections of slow, steady growth of economies and populations, suggests that by 2050, humanity’s demand on nature will be twice the biosphere’s productive capacity”.
That sounds pretty worrying, right? Still, the solutions proposed, such as moving our planet towards others that could be turned into resource suppliers (or moving them closer to our own), having tens of thousands of spaceships providing resources from distant planets or even the non-SF approach of a more efficient consumption and resource gathering seem a bit far from reality at any given point. Here's why.
We addressed the matter of moving celestial bodies around in a previous article. Basically, displacing anything that size would require gigantic amounts of energy which we don't have the technology to generate yet, especially since we still have energy problems of our own. Secondly, and more importantly, even if we did have all the required technology and amounts of spare energy, shifting cosmic bodies from place would have dire consequences on a celestial scale. All celestial bodies are interdependent and removing one from place would affect others in a chain reaction. Then gravity and inertia play their parts and could set the moved planet on a crashing course towards the Earth.
Then, I find a Star Wars-like sky boiling with space cruises going to and coming from other planets in a process of supplementing our own resources highly unlikely, for a number of reasons. First, and most obvious, is the matter of finding the respective planets, which could provide the minerals, fuels or farmlands that we need. Secondly, assuming that they would eventually be found, there's the matter of terraforming them (which we lack the technology for) and ensuring stable colonies that would take care of the required operations.
Thirdly, it would also mean a spectacular jump in spacecraft technology (travel, carriage and detection) which we're still far from achieving. Of course, the primal aspect that covers all these matters is money. Since we don't even have enough money to support ourselves, where could we get the amount that would support our reach farther into space? Perhaps the money aspect begins to show that it wasn't such a great success after all, at least not the way it was implemented, especially in the light of the economic crisis. Or perhaps science, in its entirety, should be granted the necessary money in a totally different way. But this is clearly a different topic.
Of course, should any of these be successful, it's hard to believe that any of us living today will still be there to witness. So, what about us, how are we going to face the ever-increasing problems that overpopulation, sloppy resource depletion and consumption generate? It seems that, although the latest technology provides terrifying numbers related to the impact of the human race on the environment, little is done on a large scale to stop and revert it. Is technology rather built to observe than to interfere?
With all the progress of science, the slope of our decline grows steeper. The causes are multiple, and the lack of cooperation between governments and scientific institutions, as well as that of an economy that would support science appropriately are further increasing the negative effect. While population spreading could be contained, the subsequent impact on nature cannot. But before coming to desperate measures (also described in Sci-Fi novels), such as controlling further population increase or eliminating a large part of the existing one, perhaps a better idea is found and adopted in due time. In the meantime, as always, we should wait.
