This article, published with the Royal United Services Institute, discusses the role of sustainability when expanding human activities into outer space. The article illustrates how a framework for space expansion is being set right now, but that this framework risks expanding unsustainable practices and paradigms into space. Consequently, global civilization risks wasting immense amounts of resources and even failing to sustain humanity at worst. In response, the article suggests five points of emphasis for a robust sustainability policy for space expansion.
The article begins as follows:
When expanding into outer space, humanity risks magnifying past mistakes, ones that have triggered a global state of unsustainability. The international community must engage now to ensure strategies for a space era support sustainability on Earth and prepare for a sustainable future in space.
Outer space is increasingly cast as a new arena for progressive human activities, including the expansion of civilisation itself. Success in space programmes could mean humanity faces a vast new realm of opportunity, comparable to earlier revolutions. While it will take generations to become a multiplanetary civilisation, the framework to steer these developments is being laid now, based on widespread and historically ingrained ideas about progress. In particular, space is cast as a solution to or escape from sustainability concerns. However, such a framing could backfire. It misunderstands threats to sustainability on Earth and risks expanding unsustainable systems, practices and paradigms into space. The international community must engage now to preventatively reshape this framework into one that supports sustainability on Earth and a sustainable future in space.
Space as a Sustainability Solution
One primary threat to sustainability on Earth is environmental resource extraction. Extracting coal, oil and natural gas drives global climate change, related global problems like ocean acidification, and various forms of local pollution such as air quality. Extraction of materials for alternative energy paradigms can also cause environmental damage, such as metals used in batteries, the extraction of which releases toxins into local ecosystems.
The remainder of this article is available in RUSI.
Image credit: Jonas Verstuyft via Unsplash.
