Pigs In Spa-a-a-ce...

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If the 1970's cultural reference in the title of this little post escapes you, Google it! Suffice it to say that I'm not talking puppets here, but real, live Muppets. Henry Mance in this weekend's FT, rightly highlights the crass ego tripping being indulged in by three of the worlds richest men: namely, the race for the rich to get into space [or close to it] for a few short minutes, for the kind of money most of us take ten years or more to earn. Bezos, Musk and Branson, stand up and take a bow!

Leaving the planet is pretty much a pointless exercise in exotic tourism - there is little left to be learned out there that we actually need down here: curiosity is a fine thing, but not at any cost. Our problems are fundamentally ecological and currently, virally, epidemiological and frankly, spending billions on chucking more pollutants into the high atmosphere so that a handful of the stupidly rich can tick off another pointless box in their bucket list, is an affront to humanity. Those three named individuals have a combined wealth that could support a global vaccination programme without further investment and which would not touch the sides of their collective bank balance.

The rejoinder that would come back from any one of these 'entrepreneurs' regarding the environmental impact of their three disparate space 'programmes' is that they can 'offset' their carbon emissions with money, effectively. Not so: carbon offsetting is a scam perpetrated on the rest of us by the shameful cabal that is corporate business. It's kicking the can further and further down the road. It don't work: look around us - the weather is going mad on us and it will only get worse if we stop playing at spacemen and invest some of that ill-gotten moolah in the planet. The only one paying any lip service is Musk, and he's basically off-world himself anyway. Battery farms are good on paper, but they still need oodles of exotic natural resources and electricity to charge the buggers. Using less of everything is the only answer: the rest is all jaw and posture.

I'm reminded of Douglas Adams device in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series: all the useful people were put on one escape ship and all the self-important people who thought they were useful, another: both sent off in  completely different directions, ne'er the twain to meet again. Maybe what we are seeing now is the ultimate expression of Darwinism - the rich seeing that the only way out from the planet in which destruction they have actively conspired, is to to head off into space and escape. I wonder what they'll think when they realise that they've left behind the only real support structure they ever had - us. But at least then we could get on with the job of repairing as much of their damage to our only home as is humanly possible.


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