Glasgow galactica

In HG Wells’s 1898 sci-fi page-turner, The War of the Worlds, Martians train ‘envious eyes’ on Earth. Then Mars attacks, deploying heat-rays and terrifying tripod-machines. We’re told theirs is a dying planet, whereas Earth is ‘green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility’.Today, Earth’s less green than greenhouse gassed. So, COP26 notwithstanding, thank Jupiter that Elon Musk wants to settle us Earthlings on Mars. More CO2-choked and freak weather-beaten than in pre-industrial days, we’re all into space now. We exult when billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos showcase weightlessness in virgin galactica and look downwards at our fading-blue origins. Seemingly hit by astroenteritis, SpaceX boss Musk understandably views space as lebensraum. No less than cosmologist Stephen Hawking warned that mankind’s survival required exiting ‘our fragile planet’ before nukes, viruses, asteroids or climate calamity struck. Providentially, Nasa head Bill Nelson says aliens and ‘other planet Earths’ probably exist. Ergo, Mars isn’t the only New World we can colonise Columbus-style, provided we don’t get irradiated and asphyxiated. And provided the natives, if any, aren’t smarter and toothier than us like in the Alien movie franchise. Think. Should aliens resemble ET rather than the Xenomorph, we conquistadors could, in a giant leap, rig interplanetary trade and traffic(k) in mankind’s favour. Mind you, Nelson also claims the possibility of Life-Out-There makes him want to be a ‘better steward’ of Earth, our overexploited planet. Britain’s down-to-earth Prince William says it differently: Humanity’s ‘greatest brains’ should save our climate-threatened home rather than seek extraterrestrial residency. Well, with G20 acting cagey on anthropogenic climate change, Earth’s best brains are brainstorming in Glasgow. Given the Kyoto-to-Paris history of missed targets, broken pledges and COP-outs, they might prove Greta Thunberg right. Namely, do a whole lotta ‘blah, blah, blah’ on never-achieved emissions cuts, nearer-zero net zero, greenwashing carbon markets, undelivered climate justice and ever-deferred climate finance and tech transfers. Or, miraculously, they might heed the UN’s ‘code red for humanity’.Either way, risk-taking global PPPs might want to invest in future interstellar labour migration to extract space’s mineable, weaponisable and repatriable resources. Think how many desperate job-seekers from low wage, energy-hungry developing nations they could employ in occupationally hazardous space colonies. Meantime, the super rich can always live out fossil-fuelled doomsday in super-luxury underground bunkers. Right here on Earth.