Extraterrestrial litterbugs

After trashing Earth, we now risk doing the same to space, writes PETERSINGER, with AGATA SAGAN, in the second of three essays.

- PETERSINGER

In April 10, 2019, scientists produced the first image of a black hole, a century after Einstein’s work had implied the existence of such extraordinary objects. You didn’t need to know a lot of physics to be impressed by the image. The black hole it showed was some 55 million light-years distant from us and had a diameter about 3 million times that of the Earth. Like the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by William Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, showing the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, the image of the black hole calls on us to assess our place in the universe, but the two photos pull us in different directions. “Earthrise” allowed us to see our planet as a sphere in space and emphatically displays the importance of making that sphere sustainable. Seeing the black hole, in contrast, forces us to grapple with the strangeness of the universe of which we are such a tiny part.

In the same week that we marvelled at the black hole, a private Israeli lunar probe, Beresheet, experienced a technical glitch and crashed onto the surface of the Moon. Its venture into space, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture that plans to colonise Mars, raises ethical issues about humans’ exploration and use of the universe beyond their own planet. Are the solar system and the entire universe beyond now open for everyone to colonise, for whatever purpose they wish, if they have the means to do so?