Tournament: tdi camp tournament | Round: 5 | Opponent: rex hot chili peppers ak | Judge: julian anderson
wikify isn't working for this, it's open sourced.
Recent US legislation ensures private space mining and ownership allowed now
Williams 20 ~(Matt Williams, Reporter) "Trump signs an executive order allowing mining the moon and asteroids," Phys Org, April 13, 2020, https://phys.org/news/2020-04-trump-moon-asteroids.html~~ TDI
Trump signs an executive order allowing mining the moon and asteroids
In 2015,
AND
debate that began with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.
New investments coming and companies are launching into asteroid mining – economic incentives make it alluring
Tosar 20 ~(Borja Tosar, reporter) "Asteroid Mining: A New Space Race," OpenMind BBVA, May 18, 2020, https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/asteroid-mining-a-new-space-race/~~ TDI
This is not science fiction. There are now space mining companies, such as
AND
deGrasse argues that the planet's first trillionaire will undoubtedly be a space miner.
Scoles 15 ~(Sarah Scoles, freelance science writer, contributor at Wired and Popular Science, author of the books Making Contact and They Are Already Here) "Dust from asteroid mining spells danger for satellites," New Scientist, May 27, 2015, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630235-100-dust-from-asteroid-mining-spells-danger-for-satellites/~~ TDI
Study this is citing – Javier Roa, Space Dynamic Group, Applied Physics Department
AND
30 per cent (arxiv.org/abs/1505.03800).
Space dust wrecks satellites and collisions multiply particles – limited space dust already causes damage which privatized mining exponentially worsens
Intagliata 17 ~(Christopher Intagliata, MA Journalism from NYU, Editor for NPRs All Things Considered, Reporter/Host for Scientific American's 60 Second Science) "The Sneaky Danger of Space Dust," Scientific American, May 11, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-sneaky-danger-of-space-dust/~~ TDI
When tiny particles of space debris slam into satellites, the collision could cause the emission of hardware-frying radiation, Christopher Intagliata reports.
Aside from all the satellites, and the space station orbiting the Earth, there's a lot of trash circling the planet, too. Twenty-one thousand baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA. But that number's dwarfed by the number of small particles. There's hundreds of millions of those.
"And those smaller particles tend to be going fast. Think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach, and that would be on the large side. But they're going 60 kilometers per second."
Sigrid Close, an applied physicist and astronautical engineer at Stanford University. Close says that whereas mechanical damage—like punctures—is the worry with the bigger chunks, the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites—by causing electrical damage.
"We also think this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies we see on orbit, that right now are basically tagged as 'unknown cause.'"
Close and her colleague Alex Fletcher modeled this phenomenon mathematically, based on plasma physics behavior. And here's what they think happens. First, the dust slams into the spacecraft. Incredibly fast. It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship—and itself. Which generates a cloud of ions and electrons, traveling at different speeds. And then: "It's like a spring action, the electrons are pulled back to the ions, ions are being pushed ahead a little bit. And then the electrons overshoot the ions, so they oscillate, and then they go back out again."
That movement of electrons creates a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which Close says could be the culprit for some of that electrical damage to satellites. The study is in the journal Physics of Plasmas. ~Alex C. Fletcher and Sigrid Close, Particle-in-cell simulations of an RF emission mechanism associated with hypervelocity impact plasmas~
Alonso 18 ~(Elisa Jiménez Alonso, communications consultant with Acclimatise, climate resilience organization) "Earth Observation of Increasing Importance for Climate Change Adaptation," Acclimatise, May 2, 2018, https://www.acclimatise.uk.com/2018/05/02/earth-observation-of-increasing-importance-for-climate-change-adaptation/~~ TDI
Earth observation (EO) satellites are playing an increasingly important role in assessing climate change. By providing a constant and consistent stream of data about the state of the climate, EO is not just improving scientific outcomes but can also inform climate policy.
Managing climate-related risks effectively requires accurate, robust, sustained, and wide-ranging climate information. Reliable observational climate data can help scientists test the accuracy of their models and improve the science of attributing certain events to climate change. Information based on projections from models and historic data can help decision makers plan and implement adaptation actions.
Providing information in data-sparse regions
Ground-based weather and climate monitoring systems only cover about 30 of the Earth's surface. In many parts of the world such data is incomplete and patchy due to poorly maintained weather stations and a general lack of such facilities.
EO satellites and rapidly improving satellite technology, especially data from open access programmes, offer a valuable source information for such data-sparse regions. This is especially important since countries and regions with a lack of climate data are often particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts.
International efforts for systematic observation
The importance of satellite-based observations is also recognised by the international community. Following the recommendations of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) programme, the UNFCCC strongly encourages countries that support space agencies with EO programmes to get involved in GCOS and support the programme's implementation. The Paris Agreement highlights the need for and importance of effective and progressive responses to the threat of climate change based on the best available scientific knowledge. This implies that climate knowledge needs to be strengthened, which includes continuously improving systematic observations of the Earth's climate.
To meet the need of such systematic climate observations, GCOS developed the concept of the Essential Climate Variable, or ECV. According to WMO, an ECV "is a physical, chemical or biological variable or a group of linked variables that critically contributes to the characterization of Earth' s climate." In 2010, 50 ECVs which would help the work of the UNFCCC and IPCC were defined by GCOS. The ECVs, which can be seen below, were identified due to their relevance for characterising the climate system and its changes, the technical feasibility of observing or deriving them on a global scale, and their cost effectiveness.
The 50 Essential Climate Variables as defined by GCOS.
One effort supporting the systemic observation of the climate is the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). The programme taps into its own and its member countries' EO archives that have been established in the last three decades in order to provide a timely and adequate contribution to the ECV databases required by the UNFCCC.
Robust evidence supporting climate risk management
Earth observation satellites can observe the entire Earth on a daily basis (polar orbiting satellites) or continuously monitor the disk of Earth below them (geostationary satellites) maintaining a constant watch of the entire globe. Sensors can target any point on Earth even the most remote and inhospitable areas which helps monitor deforestation in vast tropical forests and the melting of the ice caps.
Without insights offered by EO satellites there would not be enough evidence for decision makers to base their climate policies on, increasing the risk of maladaptation. Robust EO data is an invaluable resource for collecting climate information that can inform climate risk management and make it more effective.
Klein 14~(Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, pp. 12-14~
In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. "As global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents." In other words, once we allow temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our control. But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair—is that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a utopian dream. And it's not just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its report that "we're on track to a 4-C warmer world ~by century's end~ marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise." And the report cautioned that, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4-C world is possible." Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, which has quickly established itself as one of the U.K's premier climate research institutions, is even blunter; he says 4 degrees Celsius warming—7.2 degrees Fahrenheit—is "incompatible with an organized, equitable, and civilized global community." We don't know exactly what a 4 degree Celsius world would look like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and U.S. could plummet by as much as 60 percent), this at a time when demand will be surging due to population growth and a growing demand for meat. And since crops will be facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such as wide-ranging droughts, flooding, or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than the models have predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses, widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a thing exists in the first place). And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is becoming safer to assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is regularly ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable "sink", leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored. Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the window. And this process may be starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and the University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now "appears unstoppable." This likely spells down for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according to lead study author Eric Rignot "comes with a sea level rise between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide." The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst. Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even more than 4 degrees of warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report predicting that we are actually on track for 6 degrees Celsius—10.8 degrees Fahrenheit—of warming. And as the IEA's chief economist put it: "Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of us." (The evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping points—not only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more abrupt ones, like massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost.) The accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as also published a report warning businesses that we are headed for "4-C , or even 6-C" of warming. These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by one by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species. The only historical precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were headed toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put our civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were already going, which is what climate scientists have been telling us for years. As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010, "Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. When then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."
Early warning satellites going dark signals attacks – causes miscalc and goes nuclear
Orwig 16 ~(Jessica, MS in science and tech journalism from Texas AandM, BS in astronomy and physics from Ohio State) "Russia says a growing problem in space could be enough to spark a war," Insider,' January 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-space-junk-could-spark-war-2016-1~~ TDI
NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War.
Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour.
If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics.
Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.)
It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate.
This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues.
A politically dangerous dilemma
In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in the last two decades that cannot be explained.
"So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" ~deliberate action~ of the space adversary.
"This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added.
But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most.
It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned.
The Kessler Syndrome
In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium.
Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris.
The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions.
For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed," Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous.
For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites.
The future
So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper.
But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly.
Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have:
1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across
3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across
13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across
"The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.
Edwards 17 ~(Paul N. Edwards, CISAC's William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky/card is only parts of the interview directly from Paul Edwards.) "How nuclear war would affect Earth's climate," EarthSky, September 8, 2017, earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate~ TDI
We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war.
The "nuclear winter" theory of the mid-1980s played a significant role in the arms reductions of that period. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, this aspect of nuclear war has faded from view. That's not good. In the mid-2000s, climate scientists such as Alan Robock (Rutgers) took another look at nuclear winter theory. This time around, they used much-improved and much more detailed climate models than those available 20 years earlier. They also tested the potential effects of smaller nuclear exchanges.
The result: an exchange involving just 50 nuclear weapons — the kind of thing we might see in an India-Pakistan war, for example — could loft 5 billion kilograms of smoke, soot and dust high into the stratosphere. That's enough to cool the entire planet by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.25 degrees Celsius) — about where we were during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Growing seasons could be shortened enough to create really significant food shortages. So the climatic effects of even a relatively small nuclear war would be planet-wide.
What about a larger-scale conflict?
A U.S.-Russia war currently seems unlikely, but if it were to occur, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis, causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological disruption.
The effect would be similar to that of the giant meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time, we would be the dinosaurs.
Many people are concerned about North Korea's advancing missile capabilities. Is nuclear war likely in your opinion?
At this writing, I think we are closer to a nuclear war than we have been since the early 1960s. In the North Korea case, both Kim Jong-un and President Trump are bullies inclined to escalate confrontations. President Trump lacks impulse control, and there are precious few checks on his ability to initiate a nuclear strike. We have to hope that our generals, both inside and outside the White House, can rein him in.
North Korea would most certainly "lose" a nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die, including hundreds of thousands of Americans currently living in South Korea and Japan (probable North Korean targets). Such vast damage would be wrought in Korea, Japan and Pacific island territories (such as Guam) that any "victory" wouldn't deserve the name. Not only would that region be left with horrible suffering amongst the survivors; it would also immediately face famine and rampant disease. Radioactive fallout from such a war would spread around the world, including to the U.S.
It has been more than 70 years since the last time a nuclear bomb was used in warfare. What would be the effects on the environment and on human health today?
To my knowledge, most of the changes in nuclear weapons technology since the 1950s have focused on making them smaller and lighter, and making delivery systems more accurate, rather than on changing their effects on the environment or on human health. So-called "battlefield" weapons with lower explosive yields are part of some arsenals now — but it's quite unlikely that any exchange between two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs.
Increased space debris makes future space exploration and colonization impossible
Webb 18 ~(Amy Webb is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C.), "Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It's Too Late" WIRED Science April 12, 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-plan-to-stop-polluting-space-before-its-too-late/~~ TDI
Space is our next dumping ground. As many as 170 million fragments of metal and astro debris necklace Earth. That includes 20,000 pieces larger than a softball, and 500,000 about the size of a marble, according to NASA. Old satellites, like Tiangong-1, are the biggest and highest-profile lumps of rubbish, but most of it comes from rocket parts and even lost astronaut tools. Size doesn't always matter—a fleck of paint, orbiting at a high velocity, cracked the Space Shuttle's windshield.
This debris will pose a navigation hazard for many centuries to come. At least 200 objects roar back into the atmosphere each year, including pieces of solar panels and antennas and fragments of metal. All of them pose dangers for future astronauts: One plum-sized piece of gnarled space trash traveling faster than a speeding bullet could rip a five-foot hole into a spacecraft. And that collision, then, would hatch its own spectacle of shrapnel, which would join the rushing river of junk already circling the planet.
It's not just Americans doing the dumping. China and Russia each have dozens of decommissioned satellites overhead, though the US certainly does it with style. Like everyone, I marveled at the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, whose cargo included Elon Musk's Tesla Roaster and a mannequin driver named Starman. I'll admit, I teared up listening to David Bowie as the rockets separated from the payload. It was an incredible technological achievement, one proving that the system could someday transport people and goods—perhaps real cars, and real people—into space.
Now that Tesla and its driver are overhead, in America's junkyard in the sky. To be sure, space is big. Really big. Most debris soars about 1,250 miles above the Earth's surface, so you have better odds scoring a seat on Virgin Galactic's maiden voyage than witnessing Starman crash into your next door neighbor's house. But it's our behavior back here on Earth—our insistence on sending things up, without really thinking how to safely contain or send them back down—that should concern you.
We weren't always so short-sighted. Ancient Native Americans lived by the Seventh Generation Principal, a way of long-term thinking that considered how every decision would affect their descendants seven generations into the future. In Japan, Buddhist monks devoted part of their daily rituals and work to ensuring the longevity of their communities, even planting and tending to bamboo forests, which would eventually be harvested, treated and used to repair temple roofs many decades hence. With each new generation, we live life faster than our ancestors. As a result, we spend less time thinking about the farther future of humanity.
We now have our sights set on colonizing Mars, mining asteroids for research and commerce, and venturing out to the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Space is no longer the final frontier; we're already exploring it. Our current approach is about getting there, rather than considering what "getting there" could mean for future generations of humans, not to mention other life in the universe.
Where all that junk winds up isn't something we can predict accurately. We could be unintentionally wreaking havoc on civilizations far away from Earth, catalyzing future intergalactic wars. Or, we might cause far less scintillating problems. Space junk could start to behave in unpredictable ways, reflecting sunlight the wrong direction, or changing our atmosphere, or impacting the universe in ways that don't fit into our current understanding of physics.
Last week—30 years after my friends and I created an imaginary net to capture space debris—SpaceX launched RemoveDEBRIS, its own prototype, an experimental net to collect junk in orbit. It's a neat idea, but even as middle schoolers, we knew it was an impractical one. Individual nets can't possibly scale to address the hundreds of millions of particles of debris already in orbit.
The challenge is that all of our space agencies are inextricably tied to national governments and militaries. Seeking a global agreement on how to mitigate debris would involve each country divulging exactly what it was launching and when—an unlikely scenario. The private sector could collaborate to build grand-scale orbital cleaners, but their commercial interests are driven by immediate launches. Given all the planned launches in our near future, we don't have much time to wait. We must learn to be better stewards of our own planet—and commit to very long-term thinking—before we try to colonize any others.
Fitzgerald 3/9 ~(Shanon, Assistant Websites Editor at Liberty Fund), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," March 9 2021, https://www.econlib.org/why-human-space-exploration-matters/~~ TDI
While the yields to space exploration and the development of spaceflight technology may appear minimal in the immediate future, shifting our perspective to the longer term renders the human situation vis a viz space exploration extremely clear: if humans want to survive in perpetuity, we need to establish ourselves on other planets in addition to Earth. It is as simple as that. And yet we are not doing all that much to make that happen. To be clear, I'm long on Earth, too, and hope that technological improvements will continue to allow our species to get "more from less" right here on the third rock from the sun, enabling us to keep occupying the planet that saw us evolve into consciousness. I like to imagine that the distant future on Earth has the potential to be an extremely pleasant one, as advances in our scientific understanding and bio-technical praxis should hopefully allow our descendants to clean up any of the remaining messes previous generations will have left behind (e.g., nuclear and industrial waste, high amounts of atmospheric carbon, other lingering nasties) and stable-state free societies will hopefully allow all persons (or very nearly all persons) to live free and meaningful lives in productive community and exchange with their fellows. As the previous qualification highlights, the trickiest problems here on Earth and extending to wherever humans end up in the spacefaring age will still be social and political, and their successful resolution will depend more on the future state of our governing arts than our hard sciences. But regarding the negative events that could very well happen to Earth I think we all need to be equally clear: life might not make it here. There is no guarantee that it will, and in the very long run, with the expansion and subsequent death of our sun, we know with near certainty that it will not. Consider just a few possible extinction-level events that could strike even earlier: large meteors, supervolcanic eruptions, drastic climactic disruption of the "Snowball Earth" variety. As SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently observed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, "A species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external." This statement, applied to the human species, is obviously true on its face. As doomsday events go a giant asteroid might be more shocking, since we (people living today) have never experienced one before while concerned atomic scientists warn us about the nuclear bomb all the time, but the odds that we blow ourselves up are still there. Slim, but there. It's more plausible that a severe nuclear war and the nuclear winter it would likely trigger would leave the human population greatly reduced as opposed to completely extinct, but then the question becomes: why is that a risk we would want to take? The bomb is here to stay for now, but there is no reason that 100 of known life in the universe needs to stay here on Earth to keep it company, waiting around for something even more destructive to show up. While we're on that happy subject: Do you have any good intuitions about our collective chances against hostile, or simply arrogant or domineering, technologically-advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms, if and/or when they decide to pay us a visit on our home turf? These scary situation sketches will suffice. At bottom, the core reason I am a believer in the need to make life—and not just human life—multiplanetary is the same basic reason I would never counsel a friend to keep all their money and valuables in one place: diversification is good. Wisdom and experience suggest we store precious resources in multiple safe(ish) places. Diversification limits our exposure to risk, and increases our resilience when bad things do happen. One reserve gets hit, two or three others survive, and you probably feel that the effort to spread things out was worth it. What I'm saying here has strong undercurrents of common sense, yet our approach to the human population itself—the universal store and font of "human capital"—does not currently prioritize diversification to the degree our technological capabilities would allow. The distribution of the human population, and of almost all human knowledge and works, is overwhelmingly local. (Let us set to one side the possibility that aliens somewhere maintain an archive of captured human information.) Establishing outposts at least as large as those we maintain in Antarctica on the Moon and Mars, or other more suitable sites, by the end of this century would be a great first step toward genuinely diversifying the physical locations of the most precious resources known to us: human consciousness and creativity, human love and human soul, the great works in which all these things are displayed. Add also to this list repositories of scientific knowledge and knowhow, seed reserves, and certain materials necessary to re-start the manufacturing of fundamental technologies. Spreading these goods to a few additional locations within the solar system would be a major species-and-civilization-level accomplishment that all living at the time could feel satisfied by, and even take some pride in. And this is something that we seem to be just on the cusp of being able to do, given our recent and rapid technological advances in rocketry, computers, and materials science and engineering, among other important fields for space exploration and settlement. Quickly the uniplanetary human situation is becoming, if it is not already, one of pure choice.
And deep space exploration is a shared goal that prevents escalation of US-Russia tensions. But privatization threatens it independent of our other internal links
CSIS 18 ~(Center for Strategic and International Studies), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," August 21, 2018 https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/space-cooperation~~ TDI
U.S.-Russian space cooperation continues to be a stated mutual goal. In April 2018, President Putin said of space, "Thank God, this field of activity is not being influenced by problems in politics. Therefore, I hope that everything will develop, since it is in the interests of everyone…This is a sphere that unites people. I hope it will continue to be this way." During his statement at a recent event at CSIS, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, "~space~ is our best opportunity to dialogue when everything else falls apart. We've got American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts dependent on each other on the International Space Station, which enables us to ultimately maintain that dialogue." The U.S. and Russia both benefit from the ISS partnership. Russia provides transportation to the ISS for U.S. astronauts, from which Russia receives an average of $81 million per seat on the Soyuz (and recognition of its status as a space power). The U.S. also benefits from Russia's technical contributions to the ISS while Russia benefits The U.S. and Russia signed a joint statement in 2017 in support of the idea of collaborating on deep space exploration, including the construction of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a research-focused space station orbiting the moon. Through agreements on civilian space exploration, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway or future Mars projects, that have clear benefits to both sides, some degree of cooperation will remain in both countries' interest. The high price tag for pursuing space exploration alone and opportunities for sharing and receiving technical expertise encourages international partnerships like the ISS.
It's make or break for the relationship—Ukraine, decline of US moral authority on international affairs puts us at the brink of the end of Russian diplomacy and even war
Weir 21 ~(Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998. He's traveled over much of that vast territory, reporting on stories ranging from Russia's financial crash to the war in Chechnya, creeping Islamization in central Asia, Russia's demographic crisis, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his repeated returns to the Kremlin, and the ups and downs of US-Russia relations). "Worse than the Cold War? US-Russia relations hit new low." Christian Science Monitor 4-20-2021 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/0420/Worse-than-the-Cold-War-US-Russia-relations-hit-new-low~~ TDI
Russia's relations with the West, and the United States in particular, appear to be plumbing depths of acrimony and mutual misunderstanding unseen even during the original Cold War.
After years of deteriorating relations, sanctions, tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, and an escalating "information war," some in Moscow are asking if there even is any point in seeking renewed dialogue with the U.S., if only out of concern that more talking might just make things worse.
Events have cascaded over the past month. Russia's treatment of imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny, who has been sent to a prison hospital amid reports of failing health, underlines the sharp perceived differences between Russia and the West over matters of human rights. Meanwhile, a Russian military buildup near Ukraine has illustrated that the conflict in the Donbass region might explode at any time, possibly even dragging Russia and NATO into direct confrontation.
With its relations with Washington at a nadir, Russia is eyeing a more pragmatic, if adversarial, relationship with the U.S. in the hopes of getting the respect it desires.
President Joe Biden surprised the Kremlin by proposing a "personal summit" to discuss the growing list of U.S.-Russia disagreements in a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last week. He later spoke of the need for "disengagement" in the escalating tensions around Ukraine, and postponed a planned visit of two U.S. warships to Russia-adjacent waters in the Black Sea.
But days later he also imposed a package of tough sanctions against Russia, for its alleged SolarWinds hacking and interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, infuriating Moscow and drawing threats of retaliation. Last month, after Mr. Biden agreed with a journalist's intimation that Mr. Putin is a "killer," the Kremlin ordered Russia's ambassador to the U.S. to return home for intensive consultations, an almost unprecedented peacetime move. Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that the acting U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, should likewise go back to Washington for a spell. On Tuesday, Mr. Sullivan announced he would do just that this week.
And there is a growing sense in Moscow that the downward spiral of East-West ties has reached a point of no return, and that Russia should consider abandoning hopes of reconciliation with the West and seek permanent alternatives: perhaps in an intensified compact with China, and targeted relationships with countries of Europe and other regions that are willing to do business with Moscow.
"Things are at rock bottom. This may not be structurally a cold war in the way the old one was, but mentally, in terms of atmosphere, it's even worse," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. "The fact that Biden offered a summit meeting would have sounded a hopeful note anytime in the past. Now, nobody can be sure of that. A hypothetical Putin-Biden meeting might not prove to be a path to better relations, but just the opposite. It could just become a shouting match that would bring a hardening of differences, and make relations look like even more of a dead end."
Room for discussion
Foreign policy experts agree that there is a long list of practical issues that could benefit from purposeful high-level discussion. With the U.S. preparing to finally exit Afghanistan, some coordination with regional countries, including Russia and its Central Asian allies, might make the transition easier for everyone. One of Mr. Biden's first acts in office was to extend the New START arms control agreement, which the Trump administration had been threatening to abandon, but the former paradigm of strategic stability remains in tatters and requires urgent attention, experts say.
"If you are looking for opportunities to make the world a safer place through reason and compromise, there are quite a few," says Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. "There are also some areas where the best we could do is agree to disagree, such as Ukraine and human rights issues."
The plight of Mr. Navalny, which has evoked so much outrage in the West, seems unlikely to provide leverage in dealing with the Kremlin because – as Western moral authority fades – Russian public opinion appears indifferent, or even in agreement with its government's actions. Recent surveys by the Levada Center in Moscow, Russia's only independent pollster, found that fewer than a fifth of Russians approve of Mr. Navalny's activities, while well over half disapprove. An April poll found that while 29 of Russians consider Mr. Navalny's imprisonment unfair, 48 think it is fair.
Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, shown here during a hearing in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow Feb. 12, 2021, is in poor health amid his hunger strike while in prison in Russia. He was recently moved to a prison hospital.
Tensions around the Russian-backed rebel republics in eastern Ukraine have been much severer than usual, with a spike in violent incidents on the front line, a demonstrative Russian military buildup near the borders, and strong U.S. and NATO affirmations of support for Kyiv. The Russian narrative claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy triggered the crisis a month ago by signing a decree that makes retaking the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea official Ukrainian state policy. Mr. Zelenskiy has also appealed to the U.S. and Europe to expedite Ukraine's membership in NATO, which Russia has long described as a "red line" that would lead to war.
But Russian leaders, who have been at pains to deny any direct involvement in Ukraine's war for the past seven years, now say openly that they will fight to defend the two rebel republics. Top Kremlin official Dmitry Kozak even warned that if conflict erupts, it could be "the beginning of the end" for Ukraine.
"This is a very desperate situation," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kyiv. "We know the West is not going to help Ukraine militarily if it comes to war. So we need to find some kind of workable compromises, not more pretexts for war."
Time to turn eastward?
In this increasingly vexed atmosphere, the Russians appear to be saying there is no point in Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden meeting unless an agenda has been prepared well in advance, setting out a few achievable goals and leaving aside areas where there can be no agreement.
"Russia isn't going to take part in another circus like we had with Trump in Helsinki in 2018," says Sergei Markedonov, an expert with MGIMO University in Moscow. "What is needed is a deeper dialogue. That could begin if we had a real old-fashioned summit between Biden and Putin, one that has been calculated to yield at least some positive results. We need to find a modus vivendi going forward, and the present course is not leading there."
Alternatively, Russia may turn away from any hopes of even pragmatic rapprochement with the West, experts warn.
Mr. Lukyanov, who maintains close contact with his Chinese counterparts, says they felt blindsided at a summit with U.S. foreign policy chiefs in Alaska last month, when what they expected to be a practical discussion of how to overcome the acrimonious Trump-era legacy in their relations turned into what they saw as a U.S. lecture about how China needs to obey the "rules-based" international order.
"It was the Chinese, in the past, who were very cautious about participating" in anything that looked like an anti-Western alliance, says Mr. Lukyanov. "We are hearing a new tone from them now. Now our growing relationship with China isn't just about compensating for a lack of relations with the U.S. It's about the need to build up a group of countries that will resist the U.S., aimed at containing U.S. activities and policies that are harmful to our two countries."
Owen Cotton-Barratt 17. PhD in Pure Mathematics, Oxford, Lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford, Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute. 2-3-2017. "Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance." https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the unprecedented destructive power of nuclear weapons. However, even in an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, despite horrific casualties, neither country's population is likely to be completely destroyed by the direct effects of the blast, fire, and radiation.8 The aftermath could be much worse: the burning of flammable materials could send massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, which would absorb sunlight and cause sustained global cooling, severe ozone loss, and agricultural disruption – a nuclear winter.
According to one model 9, an all-out exchange of 4,000 weapons10 could lead to a drop in global temperatures of around 8°C, making it impossible to grow food for 4 to 5 years. This could leave some survivors in parts of Australia and New Zealand, but they would be in a very precarious situation and the threat of extinction from other sources would be great. An exchange on this scale is only possible between the US and Russia who have more than 90 of the world's nuclear weapons, with stockpiles of around 4,500 warheads each, although many are not operationally deployed.11 Some models suggest that even a small regional nuclear war involving 100 nuclear weapons would produce a nuclear winter serious enough to put two billion people at risk of starvation,12 though this estimate might be pessimistic.13 Wars on this scale are unlikely to lead to outright human extinction, but this does suggest that conflicts which are around an order of magnitude larger may be likely to threaten civilisation. It should be emphasised that there is very large uncertainty about the effects of a large nuclear war on global climate. This remains an area where increased academic research work, including more detailed climate modelling and a better understanding of how survivors might be able to cope and adapt, would have high returns.
It is very difficult to precisely estimate the probability of existential risk from nuclear war over the next century, and existing attempts leave very large confidence intervals. According to many experts, the most likely nuclear war at present is between India and Pakistan.14 However, given the relatively modest size of their arsenals, the risk of human extinction is plausibly greater from a conflict between the United States and Russia. Tensions between these countries have increased in recent years and it seems unreasonable to rule out the possibility of them rising further in the future.
Oni 19 ~(David, a space industry and technology analyst at Space in Africa. He's a graduate of Mining Engineering from the Federal University of Technology Akure.) "The Effect of Asteroid Mining on Mining Activities in Africa," Africa News, 9/24/19, https://africanews.space/the-effect-of-asteroid-mining-on-mining-activities-in-africa/~~
At the moment, Asteroid mining poses no threat to terrestrial mining; however, this will not hold for long. The space industry is progressing at such a rapid pace, and the prospects are unequivocally mouth-watering. The big question is, will asteroid mining lure away investors in Africa? The planetary resources company estimates that a single 30-m asteroid may contain 30 billion dollars in platinum alone and a 500m rock could contain half the entire world resources of PGM. Considering the abundance of minerals in asteroids, once asteroid mining materialises, it will severely affect the precious metals market, usurp the prices of rare earth minerals, and a whole lot more because minerals that are usually somewhat scarce on earth will be easily accessible on asteroids. While foreign investors run the majority of the large-scale mining activities in the region, reports say that many African countries are dangerously dependent on mining activities. For some African countries, despite massive mineral wealth, their mining sectors are underdeveloped, and this is as a result of much focus on oil resources and a couple of other challenges. The million-dollar question is, what will become of the mining activities in Africa?
Tollefsen 17 ~(Andreas Forø, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Oslo) "Experienced poverty and local conflict violence," Conflict Management and Peace Science, 12/21/17, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320740608_Experienced_poverty_and_local_conflict_violence~~
The present study's empirical contributions seek to help rectify the inadequate measures of poverty that have come to characterize the literature. To begin with, the article improves our understanding of whether and where a local poverty–conflict nexus exists by deploying experiential data on individuals' actual wellbeing—which I argue is more closely connected to people's motives and rationale for taking up arms. Second, the article examines the sociopolitical context's conditioning effect on the poverty–conflict nexus. This is achieved by including data on individuals' perceptions surrounding the quality of their local institutions, the presence of group grievances, and local unemployment rates. These factors, I argue, are more closely linked to reasons for fighting than are common proxies such as night-time luminosity and estimates of economic activity, both of which are often derived from dividing GDP per capita by local population counts.
Poverty—a state in which individuals' basic needs go unmet—has been shown to motivate people to join rebellions. Humphreys and Weinstein (2008), for instance, found that poverty predicted inscription in the Revolutionary United Front during Sierra Leone's civil war. Barrett (2011) similarly saw how promises of loot lured the poor to enlist in the 1997– 1998 dispute in Nigeria's local government area known as Toto. Combatants of the Toto conflict were also more likely to join the rebellion if they stood to gain personal protection, food, and shelter.
For the present study, I developed a dataset by aggregating survey responses from the pan-African Afrobarometer survey to subnational districts and combining the results with information on post-survey violent conflicts. The dataset consists of 4008 subnational districts, spanning 35 African countries. As most districts were only assessed once, thus restricting study of within-unit variation, survey responses were also aggregated to higher-order subnational regions, resulting in a dataset of 111 regions that were surveyed at least twice; this permitted a region-level fixed-effects model design.
Using a pooled cross-sectional dataset of districts, I found that high levels of poverty were linked to increases in local conflict-based violence. Districts with a large share of poor individuals, both in absolute terms and relative to country average, had a higher risk ofconflict than more affluent areas. This relationship held in a coarsened exact matching setup, as well as in a region-level fixed effects design with repeated measurements across time. While the results reveal a local poverty–conflict link, they do not aid in uncovering underlying mechanisms.
Using interactions models, I found that poverty increased the risk of conflict, although only where local institutions are weak. The results also show that poverty-stricken areas in which individuals strongly perceive group injustice have a greater risk of conflict than similarly impoverished regions with no aggrieved population. A departure from the local individual opportunity cost explanation, local economic opportunities do not seem to condition the poverty–conflict nexus. In sum, the results suggest that while poverty is significantly connected to conflict, high-quality institutions and inclusiveness of ethnic groups can prevent violence. Although a wide range of robustness checks and alternative model specifications were implemented, including matching and fixed-effects models, the issue of endogeneity could not be ruled out; doing so would require some kind of exogenous instrument, which I have been unable to identify.
The remainder of this article elaborates on the theoretical framework linking subnational poverty to local conflict-based violence. This is followed by a discussion of existing methods for measuring local poverty and their potential shortcomings. Next presented is the study's research design and modeling strategy, followed by a discussion of empirical results. The conclusion considers the study's limitations and proposes avenues for future research on poverty in locations that support rebel groups.
Poverty and conflict
A direct link
A connection between low income and risk of conflict is among the most robust findings in the literature on civil wars (Hegre and Sambanis, 2006). However, there is little consensus on the mechanisms through which poverty may produce conflict. Collier and Hoeffler (1998) claimed that low per-capita income lowers the opportunity cost of rebellion because when they have less to lose from taking up arms, poorer individuals become more inclined to rebel. Fearon and Laitin (2003) observed that poorer countries experience more conflict because they are unable to monitor and control all of their territory, thereby creating pockets of hospitable conditions for insurgents; Tollefsen and Buhaug (2015) identified a similar scenario at the local level.
Yeisley 11 ~(USAF Lieutenant Colonel Mark O. Yeisley, assistant professor of international relations at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. MA Colorado State, PhD in international relations from Duke University) "Bipolarity, Proxy Wars, and the Rise of China," Strategic Studies Quarterly, Winter 2011, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26270538?seq=1~~#metadata_info_tab_contents~~ TDI
Bipolarity, Nuclear Weapons, and Sino-US Proxy Conflict in Africa
It is likely China will achieve economic and then military parity with the United States in the next two decades. China currently possesses 240 nuclear warheads and 135 ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States or its allies; that number of nuclear warheads is estimated to double by the mid 2020s.43 As during the Cold War, a bipolar system in which war between the United States and China is too costly will lead to policy decisions that seek conflict resolution elsewhere.44 But why would China's rising necessarily lead to geostrategic competition with the United States, and where would this most likely occur? Unlike the Cold War, access to strategic resources rather than ideology would lie at the heart of future US-Sino competition, and the new "great game" will most likely be played in Africa.
Despite Communist Party control of its government, China is not interested in spreading its version of communism and is much more pragmatic in its objectives—securing resources to meet the needs of its citizens and improve their standard of living.45 Some estimates show that China will overtake the United States to become the world's largest economy by 2015, and rising powers usually take the necessary steps to "ensure markets, materials, and transportation routes."46 China is the leading global consumer of aluminum, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, tin, and iron ore, and its metal needs now represent more than 25 percent of the world's total.47 In contrast, from 1970 to 1995, US consumption of all materials, including metals, accounted for one-third of the global total despite representing only 5 percent of the world's population.48 China is the largest energy consumer, according to the International Energy Agency, surpassing the United States in consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas in 2009.49 As the two largest consumers of both global energy and materials, the United States and China must seek foreign policy prescriptions to fulfill future resource needs. While the United States can alleviate some of its energy needs via bio- or coal-based fuels, hydrogen, or natural gas alternatives, China currently lacks the technological know-how to do so and remains tied to a mainly nonrenewable energy resource base. Since the majority of these needs are nonrenewable, competition of necessity will be zero-sum and will be conducted via all instruments of power.50
Africa is home to a wealth of mineral and energy resources, much of which still remains largely unexploited. Seven African states possess huge endowments of oil, and four of these have equally substantial amounts of natural gas.51 Africa also enjoys large deposits of bauxite (used to make aluminum), copper, lead, nickel, zinc, and iron ore, all of which are imported and highly desired by China. Recent activity serves to prove that China seeks greater access to natural resources in Africa by avidly promoting Chinese development in a large number of African nations. South Africa, the continent's largest economy, has recently allowed China to help develop its vast mineral wealth; it is China's number one African source of manganese, iron, and copper.52 Chinese involvement in Africa is not wholly extractive; the continent provides a booming export market for China's goods and a forum to augment its soft power in the region by offering alternatives to the political and economic baggage that accompanies US foreign aid.53
Of primary interest is open access to Africa's significant deposits of oil and other energy resources. For example, China has 4,000 military personnel in Sudan to protect its interests in energy and mineral investments there; it also owns 40 percent of the Greater Nile Oil Production Company.54 Estimates indicate that within the next few decades China will obtain 40 percent of its oil and gas supplies from Africa.55 Trade and investment in Africa have also been on the rise; trade has grown more than 10 percent annually in the past decade. Between 2002 and 2004, African exports to China doubled, ranking it third behind the United States and France in trade with the continent. Chinese investment is also growing; more than 700 Chinese business operations across Africa total over $1 billion. Aid and direct economic assistance are increasing as well, and China has forgiven the debt of some 31 African nations.56
Africa is thus a vital foreign interest for the Chinese and must be for the United States; access to its mineral and petroleum wealth is crucial to the survival of each.57 Although the US and Chinese economies are tightly interconnected, the nonrenewable nature of these assets means competition will remain a zero-sum game. Nearly all African states have been independent entities for less than 50 years; consolidating robust domestic state institutions and stable governments remains problematic.58 Studies have shown that weak governments are often prime targets for civil conflicts that prove costly to control.59 Many African nations possess both strategic resources and weak regimes, making them vulnerable to internal conflict and thus valuable candidates for assistance from China or the United States to help settle their domestic grievances. With access to African resources of vital strategic interest to each side, competition could likely occur by proxy via diplomatic, economic, or military assistance to one (or both) of the parties involved.
Realist claims that focusing on third-world issues is misplaced are thus fallacious; war in a future US-China bipolar system remains as costly as it was during the Cold War. Because of the fragile nature of many African regimes, domestic grievances are more prone to result in conflict; US and Chinese strategic interests will dictate an intrusive foreign policy to be both prudent and vital. US-Sino proxy conflicts over control of African resources will likely become necessary if these great powers are to sustain their national security postures, especially in terms of strategic defense.60
Mallick and Rajagopalan 19 ~(Senjuti Mallick, graduated from ILS Law College, Pune, in 2016. She was a Law Researcher at the High Court of Delhi from 2016 to 2018 and is currently pursuing LL.M in International Law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, USA. She has been doing research on Outer Space Law since she was a student at ILS. Presently, she is working on different aspects of Space Law, in particular, Space debris mitigation and removal, and the law of the commons. She has published articles on Space Law in the All India Reporter Law Journal and The Hindu.)( Dr Rajeswari (Raji) Pillai Rajagopalan is the Director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology (CSST) at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Dr Rajagopalan was the Technical Advisor to the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) (July 2018-July 2019). She was also a Non-Resident Indo-Pacific Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre from April-December 2020. As a senior Asia defence writer for The Diplomat, she writes a weekly column on Asian strategic issues.) "If space is 'the province of mankind', who owns its resources?" Occasional Papers, January 24, 2019, https://www.orfonline.org/research/if-space-is-the-province-of-mankind-who-owns-its-resources-47561/~~ TDI
A third possible option is to get a larger global endorsement of the Moon Treaty, which highlights the common heritage of mankind. The Moon Treaty is important as it addresses a "loophole" of the OST "by banning any ownership of any extraterrestrial property by any organization or private person, unless that organization is international and governmental."~lxiv~ But the fact that it has been endorsed only by a handful of countries makes it a "failure" from the international law perspective.~lxv~ Nevertheless, efforts must be made to strengthen the support base for the Moon Agreement given the potential pitfalls of resource extraction and space mining activities in outer space. Signatories to the Moon Treaty can take the lead within multilateral platforms such as the UN to debate the usefulness of the treaty in the changed context of technological advancements and new geopolitical dynamics, and potentially find compromises where there are disagreements.
Life is a prerequisite to generate value and ponder secondary questions of ethics
Elizabeth Burns 17. Elizabeth Finneron-Burns is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick and an Affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, What's wrong with human extinction?, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00455091.2016.1278150?needAccess=true, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2017)
Many, though certainly not all, people might believe that it would be wrong to bring about the end of the human species, and the reasons given for this belief are various. I begin by considering four reasons that could be given against the moral permissibility of human extinction. I will argue that only those reasons that impact the people who exist at the time that the extinction or the knowledge of the upcoming extinction occurs, can explain its wrongness. I use this conclusion to then consider in which cases human extinction would be morally permissible or impermissible, arguing that there is only a small class of cases in which it would not be wrong to cause the extinction of the human race or allow it to happen. 2.1. It would prevent the existence of very many happy people One reason of human extinction might be considered to be wrong lies in the value of human life itself. The thought here might be that it is a good thing for people to exist and enjoy happy lives and extinction would deprive more people of enjoying this good. The 'good' in this case could be understood in at least two ways. According to the first, one might believe that you benefit a person by bringing them into existence, or at least, that it is good for that person that they come to exist. The second view might hold that if humans were to go extinct, the utility foregone by the billions (or more) of people who could have lived but will now never get that opportunity, renders allowing human extinction to take place an incidence of wrongdoing. An example of this view can be found in two quotes from an Effective Altruism blog post by Peter Singer, Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage: One very bad thing about human extinction would be that billions of people would likely die painful deaths. But in our view, this is by far not the worst thing about human extinction. The worst thing about human extinction is that there would be no future generations. Since there could be so many generations in our future, the value of all those generations together greatly exceeds the value of the current generation. (Beckstead, Singer, and Wage 2013) The authors are making two claims. The first is that there is value in human life and also something valuable about creating future people which gives us a reason to do so; furthermore, it would be a very bad thing if we did not do so. The second is that, not only would it be a bad thing for there to be no future people, but it would actually be the worst thing about extinction. Since happy human lives have value, and the number of potential people who could ever exist is far greater than the number of people who exist at any one time, even if the extinction were brought about through the painful deaths of currently existing people, the former's loss would be greater than the latter's. Both claims are assuming that there is an intrinsic value in the existence of potential human life. The second claim makes the further assumption that the forgone value of the potential lives that could be lived is greater than the disvalue that would be accrued by people existing at the time of the extinction through suffering from painful and/or premature deaths. The best-known author of the post, Peter Singer is a prominent utilitarian, so it is not surprising that he would lament the potential lack of future human lives per se. However, it is not just utilitarians who share this view, even if implicitly. Indeed, other philosophers also seem to imply that they share the intuition that there is just something wrong with causing or failing to prevent the extinction of the human species such that we prevent more 'people' from having the 'opportunity to exist'. Stephen Gardiner (2009) and Martin O'Neill (personal correspondence), both sympathetic to contract theory, for example, also find it intuitive that we should want more generations to have the opportunity to exist, assuming that they have worth-living lives, and I find it plausible to think that many other people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) probably share this intuition. When we talk about future lives being 'prevented', we are saying that a possible person or a set of possible people who could potentially have existed will now never actually come to exist. To say that it is wrong to prevent people from existing could either mean that a possible person could reasonably reject a principle that permitted us not to create them, or that the foregone value of their lives provides a reason for rejecting any principle that permits extinction. To make the first claim we would have to argue that a possible person could reasonably reject any principle that prevented their existence on the grounds that it prevented them in particular from existing. However, this is implausible for two reasons. First, we can only wrong someone who did, does or will actually exist because wronging involves failing to take a person's interests into account. When considering the permissibility of a principle allowing us not to create Person X, we cannot take X's interest in being created into account because X will not exist if we follow the principle. By considering the standpoint of a person in our deliberations we consider the burdens they will have to bear as a result of the principle. In this case, there is no one who will bear any burdens since if the principle is followed (that is, if we do not create X), X will not exist to bear any burdens. So, only people who do/will actually exist can bear the brunt of a principle, and therefore occupy a standpoint that is owed justification. Second, existence is not an interest at all and a possible person is not disadvantaged by not being caused to exist. Rather than being an interest, it is a necessary requirement in order to have interests. Rivka Weinberg describes it as 'neutral' because causing a person to exist is to create a subject who can have interests; existence is not an interest itself.3 In order to be disadvantaged, there must be some detrimental effect on your interests. However, without existence, a person does not have any interests so they cannot be disadvantaged by being kept out of existence. But, as Weinberg points out, 'never having interests itself could not be contrary to people's interests since without interest bearers, there can be no 'they' for it to be bad for' (Weinberg 2008, 13). So, a principle that results in some possible people never becoming actual does not impose any costs on those 'people' because nobody is disadvantaged by not coming into existence.4 It therefore seems that it cannot be wrong to fail to bring particular people into existence. This would mean that no one acts wrongly when they fail to create another person. Writ large, it would also not be wrong if everybody decided to exercise their prerogative not to create new people and potentially, by consequence, allow human extinction. One might respond here by saying that although it may be permissible for one person to fail to create a new person, it is not permissible if everyone chooses to do so because human lives have value and allowing human extinction would be to forgo a huge amount of value in the world. This takes us to the second way of understanding the potential wrongness of preventing people from existing — the foregone value of a life provides a reason for rejecting any principle that prevents it. One possible reply to this claim turns on the fact that many philosophers acknowledge that the only, or at least the best, way to think about the value of (individual or groups of) possible people's lives is in impersonal terms (Parfit 1984; Reiman 2007; McMahan 2009). Jeff McMahan, for example, writes 'at the time of one's choice there is no one who exists or will exist independently of that choice for whose sake one could be acting in causing him or her to exist … it seems therefore that any reason to cause or not to cause an individual to exist … is best considered an impersonal rather than individual-affecting reason' (McMahan 2009, 52). Another reply along similar lines would be to appeal to the value that is lost or at least foregone when we fail to bring into existence a next (or several next) generations of people with worth-living lives. Since ex hypothesi worth-living lives have positive value, it is better to create more such lives and worse to create fewer. Human extinction by definition is the creation of no future lives and would 'deprive' billions of 'people' of the opportunity to live worth-living lives. This might reduce the amount of value in the world at the time of the extinction (by killing already existing people), but it would also prevent a much vaster amount of value in the future (by failing to create more people). Both replies depend on the impersonal value of human life. However, recall that in contractualism impersonal values are not on their own grounds for reasonably rejecting principles. Scanlon himself says that although we have a strong reason not to destroy existing human lives, this reason 'does not flow from the thought that it is a good thing for there to be more human life rather than less' (104). In contractualism, something cannot be wrong unless there is an impact on a person. Thus, neither the impersonal value of creating a particular person nor the impersonal value of human life writ large could on its own provide a reason for rejecting a principle permitting human extinction. It seems therefore that the fact that extinction would deprive future people of the opportunity to live worth-living lives (either by failing to create either particular future people or future people in general) cannot provide us with a reason to consider human extinction to be wrong. Although the lost value of these 'lives' itself cannot be the reason explaining the wrongness of extinction, it is possible the knowledge of this loss might create a personal reason for some existing people. I will consider this possibility later on in section (d). But first I move to the second reason human extinction might be wrong per se. 2.2. It would mean the loss of the only known form of intelligent life and all civilization and intellectual progress would be lost A second reason we might think it would be wrong to cause human extinction is the loss that would occur of the only (known) form of rational life and the knowledge and civilization that that form of life has created. One thought here could be that just as some might consider it wrong to destroy an individual human heritage monument like the Sphinx, it would also be wrong if the advances made by humans over the past few millennia were lost or prevented from progressing. A related argument is made by those who feel that there is something special about humans' capacity for rationality which is valuable in itself. Since humans are the only intelligent life that we know of, it would be a loss, in itself, to the world for that to end. I admit that I struggle to fully appreciate this thought. It seems to me that Henry Sidgwick was correct in thinking that these things are only important insofar as they are important to humans (Sidgwick 1874, I.IX.4).5 If there is no form of intelligent life in the future, who would there be to lament its loss since intelligent life is the only form of life capable of appreciating intelligence? Similarly, if there is no one with the rational capacity to appreciate historic monuments and civil progress, who would there be to be negatively affected or even notice the loss?6 However, even if there is nothing special about human rationality, just as some people try to prevent the extinction of nonhuman animal species, we might think that we ought also to prevent human extinction for the sake of biodiversity. The thought in this, as well as the earlier examples, must be that it would somehow be bad for the world if there were no more humans even though there would be no one for whom it is bad. This may be so but the only way to understand this reason is impersonally. Since we are concerned with wrongness rather than badness, we must ask whether something that impacts no one's well-being, status or claims can be wrong. As we saw earlier, in the contractualist framework reasons must be personal rather than impersonal in order to provide grounds for reasonable rejection (Scanlon 1998, 218–223). Since the loss of civilization, intelligent life or biodiversity are per se impersonal reasons, there is no standpoint from which these reasons could be used to reasonably reject a principle that permitted extinction. Therefore, causing human extinction on the grounds of the loss of civilization, rational life or biodiversity would not be wrong. 2.3. Existing people would endure physical pain and/or painful and/or premature deaths Thinking about the ways in which human extinction might come about brings to the fore two more reasons it might be wrong. It could, for example, occur if all humans (or at least the critical number needed to be unable to replenish the population, leading to eventual extinction) underwent a sterilization procedure. Or perhaps it could come about due to anthropogenic climate change or a massive asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out the species in the same way it did the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Each of these scenarios would involve significant physical and/or non-physical harms to existing people and their interests. Physically, people might suffer premature and possibly also painful deaths, for example. It is not hard to imagine examples in which the process of extinction could cause premature death. A nuclear winter that killed everyone or even just every woman under the age of 50 is a clear example of such a case. Obviously, some types of premature death themselves cannot be reasons to reject a principle. Every person dies eventually, sometimes earlier than the standard expected lifespan due to accidents or causes like spontaneously occurring incurable cancers. A cause such as disease is not a moral agent and therefore it cannot be wrong if it unavoidably kills a person prematurely. Scanlon says that the fact that a principle would reduce a person's well-being gives that person a reason to reject the principle: 'components of well-being figure prominently as grounds for reasonable rejection' (Scanlon 1998, 214). However, it is not settled yet whether premature death is a setback to well-being. Some philosophers hold that death is a harm to the person who dies, whilst others argue that it is not.7 I will argue, however, that regardless of who is correct in that debate, being caused to die prematurely can be reason to reject a principle when it fails to show respect to the person as a rational agent. Scanlon says that recognizing others as rational beings with interests involves seeing reason to preserve life and prevent death: 'appreciating the value of human life is primarily a matter of seeing human lives as something to be respected, where this involves seeing reasons not to destroy them, reasons to protect them, and reasons to want them to go well' (Scanlon 1998, 104). The 'respect for life' in this case is a respect for the person living, not respect for human life in the abstract. This means that we can sometimes fail to protect human life without acting wrongfully if we still respect the person living. Scanlon gives the example of a person who faces a life of unending and extreme pain such that she wishes to end it by committing suicide. Scanlon does not think that the suicidal person shows a lack of respect for her own life by seeking to end it because the person whose life it is has no reason to want it to go on. This is important to note because it emphasizes the fact that the respect for human life is person-affecting. It is not wrong to murder because of the impersonal disvalue of death in general, but because taking someone's life without their permission shows disrespect to that person. This supports its inclusion as a reason in the contractualist formula, regardless of what side ends up winning the 'is death a harm?' debate because even if death turns out not to harm the person who died, ending their life without their consent shows disrespect to that person. A person who could reject a principle permitting another to cause his or her premature death presumably does not wish to die at that time, or in that manner. Thus, if they are killed without their consent, their interests have not been taken into account, and they have a reason to reject the principle that allowed their premature death.8 This is as true in the case of death due to extinction as it is for death due to murder. However, physical pain may also be caused to existing people without killing them, but still resulting in human extinction. Imagine, for example, surgically removing everyone's reproductive organs in order to prevent the creation of any future people. Another example could be a nuclear bomb that did not kill anyone, but did painfully render them infertile through illness or injury. These would be cases in which physical pain (through surgery or bombs) was inflicted on existing people and the extinction came about as a result of the painful incident rather than through death. Furthermore, one could imagine a situation in which a bomb (for example) killed enough people to cause extinction, but some people remained alive, but in terrible pain from injuries. It seems uncontroversial that the infliction of physical pain could be a reason to reject a principle. Although Scanlon says that an impact on well-being is not the only reason to reject principles, it plays a significant role, and indeed, most principles are likely to be rejected due to a negative impact on a person's well-being, physical or otherwise. It may be queried here whether it is actually the involuntariness of the pain that is grounds for reasonable rejection rather than the physical pain itself because not all pain that a person suffers is involuntary. One can imagine acts that can cause physical pain that are not rejectable — base jumping or life-saving or improving surgery, for example. On the other hand, pushing someone off a cliff or cutting him with a scalpel against his will are clearly rejectable acts. The difference between the two cases is that in the former, the person having the pain inflicted has consented to that pain or risk of pain. My view is that they cannot be separated in these cases and it is involuntary physical pain that is the grounds for reasonable rejection. Thus, the fact that a principle would allow unwanted physical harm gives a person who would be subjected to that harm a reason to reject the principle. Of course the mere fact that a principle causes involuntary physical harm or premature death is not sufficient to declare that the principle is rejectable — there might be countervailing reasons. In the case of extinction, what countervailing reasons might be offered in favour of the involuntary physical pain/ death-inducing harm? One such reason that might be offered is that humans are a harm to the natural environment and that the world might be a better place if there were no humans in it. It could be that humans might rightfully be considered an all-things-considered hindrance to the world rather than a benefit to it given the fact that we have been largely responsible for the extinction of many species, pollution and, most recently, climate change which have all negatively affected the natural environment in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Thus, the fact that human extinction would improve the natural environment (or at least prevent it from degrading further), is a countervailing reason in favour of extinction to be weighed against the reasons held by humans who would experience physical pain or premature death. However, the good of the environment as described above is by definition not a personal reason. Just like the loss of rational life and civilization, therefore, it cannot be a reason on its own when determining what is wrong and countervail the strong personal reasons to avoid pain/death that is held by the people who would suffer from it.9 Every person existing at the time of the extinction would have a reason to reject that principle on the grounds of the physical pain they are being forced to endure against their will that could not be countervailed by impersonal considerations such as the negative impact humans may have on the earth. Therefore, a principle that permitted extinction to be accomplished in a way that caused involuntary physical pain or premature death could quite clearly be rejectable by existing people with no relevant countervailing reasons. This means that human extinction that came about in this way would be wrong. There are of course also additional reasons they could reject a similar principle which I now turn to address in the next section. 2.4. Existing people could endure non-physical harms I said earlier than the fact in itself that there would not be any future people is an impersonal reason and can therefore not be a reason to reject a principle permitting extinction. However, this impersonal reason could give rise to a personal reason that is admissible. So, the final important reason people might think that human extinction would be wrong is that there could be various deleterious psychological effects that would be endured by existing people having the knowledge that there would be no future generations. There are two main sources of this trauma, both arising from the knowledge that there will be no more people. The first relates to individual people and the undesired negative effect on well-being that would be experienced by those who would have wanted to have children. Whilst this is by no means universal, it is fair to say that a good proportion of people feel a strong pull towards reproduction and having their lineage continue in some way. Samuel Scheffler describes the pull towards reproduction as a 'desire for a personalized relationship with the future' (Scheffler 2012, 31). Reproducing is a widely held desire and the joys of parenthood are ones that many people wish to experience. For these people knowing that they would not have descendants (or that their descendants will endure painful and/or premature deaths) could create a sense of despair and pointlessness of life. Furthermore, the inability to reproduce and have your own children because of a principle/policy that prevents you (either through bans or physical interventions) would be a significant infringement of what we consider to be a basic right to control what happens to your body. For these reasons, knowing that you will have no descendants could cause significant psychological traumas or harms even if there were no associated physical harm. The second is a more general, higher level sense of hopelessness or despair that there will be no more humans and that your projects will end with you. Even those who did not feel a strong desire to procreate themselves might feel a sense of hopelessness that any projects or goals they have for the future would not be fulfilled. Many of the projects and goals we work towards during our lifetime are also at least partly future-oriented. Why bother continuing the search for a cure for cancer if either it will not be found within humans' lifetime, and/or there will be no future people to benefit from it once it is found? Similar projects and goals that might lose their meaning when confronted with extinction include politics, artistic pursuits and even the type of philosophical work with which this paper is concerned. Even more extreme, through the words of the character Theo Faron, P.D. James says in his novel The Children of Men that 'without the hope of posterity for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins' (James 2006, 9). Even if James' claim is a bit hyperbolic and all pleasures would not actually be lost, I agree with Scheffler in finding it not implausible that the knowledge that extinction was coming and that there would be no more people would have at least a general depressive effect on people's motivation and confidence in the value of and joy in their activities (Scheffler 2012, 43). Both sources of psychological harm are personal reasons to reject a principle that permitted human extinction. Existing people could therefore reasonably reject the principle for either of these reasons. Psychological pain and the inability to pursue your personal projects, goals, and aims, are all acceptable reasons for rejecting principles in the contractualist framework. So too are infringements of rights and entitlements that we accept as important for people's lives. These psychological reasons, then, are also valid reasons to reject principles that permitted or required human extinction.
Bostrom 12 ~(Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford) "Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority." Global Policy, 2012~ TDI
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate. Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe.