Are we trashing space already?
Here’s some advice that you would hope is more than unnecessary. NASA employees - astronauts, in particular - should avoid writing their names on any landscapes they encounter on their trips through the solar system.
This plea against space vandalism is not a NASA directive. It comes from University of North Texas philosophy professor Eugene Hargrove . He is making the request today as part of a talk on eco issues in space exploration during this week’s NASA Lunar Science Institute’s conference at the Ames Research Center.
There is no doubt that we have already made an impact on the Moon. Each Apollo mission released gas equivalent to the whole of the existing lunar atmosphere. If and when spacecraft start going back more regularly, we might create a permanent atmosphere of rocket exhaust.
But we might do even worse. Hargrove’s talk, which is summarised here, raises a frightening prospect. If we end up colonising and mining the Moon and Mars, as some think we should, there is a chance that we won’t have the same concern for these environments than we do for Earth.
What if we change them beyond recognition?
Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth’s biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he’s right, we might find we don’t care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.
Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth’s natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don’t want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon’s surface. It’s quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.
Hargrove has a point, and he is right to raise it. We should stop and think about space vandalism before it gets started in earnest.