“The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war,” said Noam Chomsky, when interviewed by the New York Times. It is difficult to disagree. According to a recent United Nations report, temperature rises of 3°C are expected by the end of the 21st century, far exceeding the 2°C target imposed in the Paris Agreement, a treaty which is a small but significant step towards meaningful action. The most powerful government on the planet, the United States, is withdrawing from that agreement at the whim of Donald Trump and his climate change-denying associates, abandoning even the goal of limiting warming to 2°C. As if this weren’t bad enough, the Doomsday Clock, a measure of the imminence of global catastrophe conducted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was set to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight in 2017. Midnight represents game over, and this is as near to that end as it has been since 1960. Again, Trump’s administration is equally committed to testing the fragile and shaky geopolitical choreography that is the nuclear power balance. A war of words with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, or as Trump calls him, “rocket man” has escalated the tension, for example, when Trump tweeted: “They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the
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likes of which this world has never seen before.” Trump’s threat to shred the Iranian nuclear deal is another element destabilising our nuclear weapons situations worldwide. These crises, in tandem with the creation in many countries of the most comprehensive military and surveillance operations that humanity has ever known, look to be the defining issues of the century. It is not at all surprising that, faced with such a dire forecast, a varied group of scientists, technocrats, and billionaires are increasingly looking upwards, towards the heavens, in hope of salvation. The technology world is abuzz with SpaceX, a private firm founded by Elon Musk (a different kind of Rocket Man altogether), and its ambition to send a manned mission to Mars in 2024. Blue Origin, fronted by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, whose personal rivalry with Musk may partly fuel both of their otherworldly ambitions, is another major player in the race to conquer space. This new corporate space race is born partly of disappointment with recent progress in space exploration (or lack thereof), as the early promises of the Moon landing and the International Space Station were followed by a lack of ambition and public funding. But the economic incentive is an important driver here too. For example, the firm
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