Population control will NOT save our environment; and why Stephen Hawking was right.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. No, the space age was not that much of a technological leap, and has been tiny in scale

It's sent a few hundred people into space for a few months or so, and some highly specialised satellites and exploring spacecraft.

I agree we need to 'think ambitiously'; but direct the thought at the problem - the Earth's environment, and how to make our lifestyle here sustainable, and more equal. There's a lot of difference between producing artificial environments in space or on another planet and changing the impact of humanity on this planet. Our aim is to have us integrated with everything else on Earth, not to cut ourselves off in sealed bubbles, or to terraform the whole of Earth (ie to kill everything we don't design into a new system).

I was unaware of the current uses for helium-3; but the amounts involved are small, and we have ways of manufacturing it. Unless new uses appear, it looks like the market won't grow above a few hundred million dollars per year, which looks unlikely to justify on its own an entire infrastructure to send back material from the Moon's surface.

You still need to manufacture the machinery to move between asteroids, or the Moon, and the Earth, to mine them and move the material back to Earth orbit. That manufacture has to happen on Earth, and has an effect. And a space elevator will take a huge effort on its own.

"If we have the will and the ambition" can be said about fixing our environmental problems directly. Sadly, the will isn't there yet - as Rio has just proved. You'd need either planet-wide environmental laws, rigorously enforced, to persuade capitalist societies to clean up their act - and then, I think industry would find it far easier to behave responsibly here rather than go into space; or a complete change to a global government on socialist and environmentalist lines. I think the former is more likely to happen, but we're a long way from it yet. Hoping that fun projects in space can have side-effects of transforming the way we interact with the ecology of the Earth is wishful thinking, to me.