It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes. I can see why people got excited about it in the 1960s, back when the world was young and we still thought there might be little green people out there \u2013 who wouldn\u2019t want to meet them? Most serious opinion, however, has now settled on the \u201cWhere is everybody?\u201d paradox first framed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If there is intelligent life anywhere, why has it not sought to make contact? It\u2019s because there isn\u2019t. There\u2019s nothing out there except planets infinitely less beautiful than this one we live on.<\/p>\n
All that seems pretty uncontroversial, and I almost never mention it, except for when astronauts yet again pointlessly go into space, as with the latest moon mission. Here\u2019s what I\u2019ve noticed: people get really annoyed. I have loads of opinions way more vexatious than that one, yet none of them attract the same ire. Everyone\u2019s annoyed for a different reason \u2013 some of them think I\u2019m deliberately setting out to ruin a festivity; others act as though I\u2019m opposing innovation and modernity, which I absolutely am not. They point to all the discoveries that wouldn\u2019t have been made without the space-based wanderlust, most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other, and then they mourn the kind of world I want to live in, where nobody can see beyond their own horizon.<\/p>\n
Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves, which couldn\u2019t be more wrong \u2013 I\u2019m sure they\u2019re great; they certainly seem wholesome. Some people think I\u2019m being a scrooge, resenting the financial outlay because my soul has no poetry in it. It\u2019s a paradox, and not a delicious one, that moaning about the waste of energy that is space travel has turned into quite a significant waste of my own energy. Seriously, Nasa<\/a>, can you not just knock it off? Hasn\u2019t the US, of all nations, got bigger things to worry about?<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-517830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}