One Small Step for Mankind, One Giant Leap Toward Ruining Another One

Artemis II has successfully taken a crew of four human beings around the Moon and brought them back. No landing, but a lunar flyby at roughly 9,000 kilometres above the surface: closer than any crewed spacecraft has been since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The mission was, by any reasonable measure, an outstanding achievement. The crew performed flawlessly. The hardware performed as designed. Four people left Earth, went around the Moon, and came home. This is magnificent and I say so without reservation.

I also want to note, with what I hope is the appropriate balance of wonder and mild exasperation, that while we were doing this, the planet those four people launched from was getting on with its own agenda. Specifically: being approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, experiencing its ninth consecutive year of record sea surface temperatures, watching its Arctic sea ice continue a decline that has no plausible innocent explanation, and generating weather events that insurers have taken to describing, in the measured language of financial risk, as "unprecedented."

These two things are happening at the same time. I am not sure we have fully absorbed this.

The Backup Planet Problem

There is a line of thinking, articulated with varying degrees of seriousness by various people who own rockets, that space exploration is ultimately about species survival: that a civilisation confined to a single planet is existentially fragile, and that the long-term answer to this fragility is to become multiplanetary. I find this argument genuinely compelling in principle and completely untethered from practical reality in its current form.

The Moon has no atmosphere, no liquid water, no magnetic field to speak of, surface temperatures that range from 127 degrees Celsius in direct sunlight to minus 173 in shadow, and a radiation environment that would give a health and safety officer a migraine they could not easily recover from, assuming they survived long enough to develop one. Mars, the other popular candidate for the role of "somewhere to flee when we finish with this place," is slightly better in the sense that it has a thin atmosphere, but that atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide at a pressure roughly equivalent to standing at 35 kilometres above Earth's surface. For those of you who have not personally stood at 35 kilometres above Earth's surface, the relevant point is that you cannot breathe there. It is also, on average, minus 60 degrees Celsius, and periodically subject to planet-wide dust storms that last for months and would make a Saharan sandstorm feel like a bracing coastal breeze.

The Moon is not a backup planet. Mars is not a backup planet. They are extraordinary places to visit and eventually, over timescales that make the word "eventually" do rather a lot of heavy lifting, potentially places where small numbers of humans could live in conditions of exceptional technical difficulty while everyone else remains on Earth wondering how the situation got to a point where that seemed preferable. The notion that they represent a viable alternative to taking care of the planet that currently supports eight billion people in something broadly resembling comfort is, to be direct about it, not a serious proposition. It is a serious-sounding proposition, which is a different thing.

We do not have a backup. The one we have is the one we need to look after. These are related facts.

 

The Cognitive Dissonance Is Structural

I am not, to be clear, arguing that we should stop going to space. The case for space exploration does not depend on Earth being fine: it stands on its own merits, which include scientific discovery, technological development, the expansion of human knowledge and capability, and the simple fact that a species that looks only inward is a species that has stopped asking interesting questions. Artemis II was worth doing. Artemis III, when it lands humans on the Moon for the first time in over fifty years, will be worth doing. The science that comes from lunar exploration is genuine and valuable.

What I am arguing is that the two things are not alternatives, and that treating them as though they are is one of the more expensive intellectual errors of our era. The choice is not between going to the Moon and fixing the climate. Both require political will, public investment, and the application of sustained engineering capability to large, complex, long-timeline problems. The difference is that one of them is optional and one of them is not. We could, in principle, decide not to go to the Moon and suffer no immediate consequences beyond the loss of scientific knowledge and national prestige. We cannot decide not to address climate change and avoid consequences. The consequences are already in progress. They are simply proceeding on a timescale that human psychology finds difficult to treat as urgent.

This is the structural cognitive dissonance: we are very good at being excited about things that are visually dramatic and emotionally immediate, like rockets, and considerably less good at being excited about things that are diffuse, incremental, and require changes to comfortable habits, like decarbonisation. A rocket launch has fire and noise and a countdown and the word "go" at a specific moment. Climate change has spreadsheets, trend lines, and the slowly increasing frequency of events that were previously described as "once in a century" until the century started going rather faster than expected. One of these things gets live television coverage. The other gets a strongly worded report from a panel of scientists which is read carefully by other scientists and then summarised in a press release which is skimmed by a journalist who writes a headline that is clicked on by approximately fourteen people before being replaced by something about a celebrity.

What We Are Actually Good At

Here is what I find genuinely encouraging about the moment we are in, which I offer as a counterweight to what might otherwise read as unreserved gloom.

The Apollo programme, at its peak, consumed roughly 4% of the United States federal budget and employed 400,000 people. It produced, among other things: the integrated circuit industry, modern flight computers, water filtration technology, memory foam, scratch-resistant lenses, and a set of engineering and management practices that have been applied to large complex problems ever since. The entirety of the modern technology industry sits, in various ways, downstream of decisions made in the 1960s about how to get to the Moon. This is not a coincidence. When you direct serious resources at a hard technical problem for a sustained period, you tend to produce capabilities that exceed the original brief.

The climate problem is, in engineering terms, a large complex problem requiring sustained investment and coordinated effort across multiple technical domains simultaneously. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of problem that the Apollo model was designed for. The technologies required are, by and large, already understood: renewable energy generation, grid-scale storage, electrification of transport and heating, carbon capture, agricultural transition. The engineering is hard but not in the way that orbital mechanics is hard. The physics is known. The challenge is deployment at scale and speed, which is a project management problem as much as an engineering one.

Humanity has a reasonable track record at large-scale coordinated deployments when it decides they are worth doing. We eradicated smallpox, a disease that had killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone, through a global vaccination campaign that required coordinating governments, logistics chains, and healthcare workers across every inhabited continent including, crucially, the ones that were not getting along with each other at the time. We repaired the ozone layer via the Montreal Protocol, which stands as arguably the most successful international environmental agreement in history and is remarkable primarily because it actually worked. We deployed mobile communications infrastructure to effectively the entire population of the planet in roughly twenty years, including to places that had never had fixed telephone lines and had managed perfectly well without them until they abruptly could not imagine life without a smartphone. When human civilisation decides that a large-scale technical deployment is a priority, it has a demonstrated capability to accomplish it. The question is not capability. The question, as it has been for some decades now, is priority.

The View From 9,000 Kilometres

One of the things the Apollo astronauts consistently reported, and one of the things that has been documented extensively in the psychological literature under the term "the overview effect," is the experience of seeing Earth from a distance. The fragility of it. The thinness of the atmosphere, visible as a razor-thin blue line against the black. The absence of borders. The fact that everything that has ever happened to any human being happened on that specific object, which from a sufficient distance looks approximately the size of a marble.

The Artemis II crew has now had that experience. Four more people have seen the Earth from the vicinity of the Moon and understood, at a level that no photograph or description quite conveys, that it is small and singular and, from the perspective of anyone wishing to remain alive, irreplaceable.

I find myself hoping that this experience scales. Not literally, because the logistics of sending eight billion people on a lunar flyby are beyond even the most optimistic launch cadence projections. But the insight itself: the Earth is not large. Its atmosphere is not thick. Its systems are not robust against indefinite perturbation. The overview effect is available to anyone willing to sit with the numbers, even without the rocket.

The numbers are these: the atmosphere, the thin layer of gas that makes Earth habitable and distinguishes it from the sort of place where you would need a pressurised suit just to stand outside, extends to perhaps 100 kilometres before becoming effectively nothing. The Earth's radius is 6,371 kilometres. The atmosphere, proportionally, is thinner relative to the planet than the skin of an apple relative to the apple. If Earth were the size of a standard classroom globe, the entire atmosphere, the whole of it, all the air that has ever been breathed by every living thing that has ever lived, would be less than a millimetre thick. You would barely feel it with your finger.

We are treating this millimetre as though it were a bottomless skip.

The Thing I Actually Want to Say

Artemis II is a genuine achievement and I am glad it happened. The people who built it and flew it did something remarkable and they deserve the recognition they are receiving.

The Moon will still be there in fifty years. It has been there for four and a half billion years and shows no signs of going anywhere. The timeline for returning to it can accommodate the occasional schedule slip, the redesigned architecture, the additional funding review. The Moon is patient. It has been waiting since before complex life existed on Earth and it will wait considerably longer without complaint.

The climate does not have that kind of patience. The physical processes involved operate on their own schedule, which they have declined to adjust to match the pace of international consensus-building or the electoral cycle. Every year of meaningful emissions reduction that does not happen is a year of change that is locked in, not deferred. The atmosphere keeps a running total and it does not round down.

We are, as a species, capable of extraordinary things when we decide to do them. The evidence for this includes the fact that we have now, for the second time in history, sent human beings to the vicinity of the Moon and brought them home. The question I keep coming back to is whether we will decide that the planet we launch those rockets from deserves the same quality of engineering attention as the destination.

The overview effect, for those who have experienced it, is apparently transformative. The Earth, seen from far enough away, looks exactly like what it is: the only home we have, and not a large one, and not an indestructible one.

You do not need to go to the Moon to understand this. You just need to decide that you believe the people who did.

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