Cosmic conservation: Why experts argue portions of the solar system should remain untouched
SalonIt's getting increasingly crowded up past our atmosphere, with just of the most recent highlights being India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully touching down on the moon's south pole in mid-August while Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon a week prior. It's only a matter of time before humans begin extracting resources in large quantities from space, and we need to protect a portion of our solar system as wilderness before that happens, says Tony Milligan, Ph.D., a philosopher at King's College London, who authored a paper addressing this with Martin Elvis, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at Harvard University. "The idea that, 'There's a lot of the solar system there, there's no need to worry about it,' felt like the American mistake all over again," Milligan told Salon in a video call. "The idea that, 'There's a lot of the solar system there, there's no need to worry about it,' felt like the American mistake all over again." "Once you go past that, you're on a very rapid road to using it all and therefore having an enormous economic crisis," Elvis told Salon in a video call.
Discover Related
