We Aren't Going to Mars | Peter Schulze | TEDxAustinCollege

[Music] thank you very much good morning thank you Dave this is Mars the Red Planet here's a closer view with one of NASA's incredible Rovers renowned mathematician and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says threats to the earth are so dire that we need to prepare to escape to Mars or even farther I share professor Hawkins concerns about threats to the earth but I think we should assume that our descendants won't have anywhere else to live besides right here now I don't mean that NASA won't send astronauts to Mars or that we shouldn't explore space or anything like that I just mean I think it would be prudent to assume that everyone in future generations aside from perhaps a few explorers will live right here if I'm right about that we ought to take care of this planet besides who wants to go to Mars I'd rather be here here it's pretty nice outside it's pretty you don't need an oxygen tank to go outside you don't need a spacesuit and if you rip your clothes when you're outside it's an annoyance it's not a life-threatening catastrophe so I'm going to try to make three points first I'm gonna explain why I think it would be wise to assume that our descendants the bulk of people in the future will live right here on this planet and I'll argue therefore that we ought to look after the life-support capacity of this planet and then finally my main point is argue that lately in the United States we have not been doing a good job of that because we've been tricked we've been tricked into rejecting good environmental protection ideas on the basis of biased tests and double standards that we would know better than to accept in other circumstances so I hope that after you hear this talk these bias tests and double standard arguments will jump out at you and you'll point them out to other people and you'll help your nation and your society make better environmental decisions but first why do I think we shouldn't assume that we'll be able to go to Mars well for several reasons the first is at least of my concerns but it's still a regular relevant concern we don't have the transportation technology for people now I wouldn't be surprised if NASA overcomes that but I wouldn't bet everybody's future on it either a second reason is space travel is remarkably expensive this is the International Space Station it's 250 miles up believe it or not the United States pays Russia 80 million dollars to get one astronaut back and forth to the International Space Station 80 million dollars the biggest building on this campus and it's a big beautiful building cost a little more than thirty million dollars to build so less than half as much meanwhile as you know we have more than 7 billion brothers and sisters on this planet billions of whom live on a few dollars a day or less they can't afford a short taxi ride let alone a ride on a spaceship and the more function is more fortunate among us are not providing for their basic needs to be met in all cases it seems unlikely that we're gonna pay for their space travel this high expense of space travel is presumably why even enthusiasts like professor Hawking imagine that only a couple of thousand people could ever go anywhere else a couple of thousand people is roughly one in a million people that won't do much good for the literally thousands of millions who would be left behind another reason I think we ought to assume that our descendants will live right here is because we don't know how to make self-sustaining ecosystems out of big dead rocks so this diagram this diagram is meant to show Mars becoming like Earth not literally but taking on the self-sustaining ecosystem property unique to our planet ecosystems are incredibly complex we know some things that will destroy them we know maybe some of their requirements but the gaps in our understanding of ecosystems are vast we have no idea how to make eco systems self-sustaining ecosystems out of nonliving components in fact we can't even make a single living cell out of nonliving components so I don't think we should bet our descendants future on the on the ability to overcome this challenge another reason I don't think we should count on going to Mars is the reason to escape to Mars and keep in mind I'm not talking about exploring or NASA sending some astronauts but escaping and mass to Mars is because the reason to do so would be because we've caused so much damage to this planet in other words we've failed to sustain the life support capacity of this planet but to go to Mars and succeed on Mars we would not only have to manufacture life support capacity on Mars we would also have to sustain that life support capacity what if we can't do it here what reason is there to think we could do it there I can't see any reason so if we can sustain the life support capacity here we ought to just do that where everybody will benefit and if we can't sustain the life support capacity here it's not gonna do any good to go to Mars because we won't be able to sustain it there either so a friend of my younger friend of mine I don't know much about video games I'm too old but a younger friend of mine said sustaining the life-support capacity to Earth that's like beating the video game on easy mode but creating ecosystems on Mars and sustaining those that's like trying to beat the video game on expert or or maybe even impossible mode so I think the obvious conclusion is not to damage the life-support capacity of this planet well how are we doing in that regard not very well there are millions literally millions of people doing great work and there all kinds of minor victories but the major trends are in the wrong direction we are depleting forests depleting fisheries depleting aquifers depleting the soil we're changing the chemical composition of both the atmosphere in the oceans and causing climate change and maybe most profoundly of all were depleting biodiversity and the ecosystems upon which both we and that biodiversity depend the trends are in the wrong decision there must be something terribly wrong with our decisions we're damaging life-support capacity of the only place in the universe known to support life now we haven't always made bad decisions my parents generation the grandparents of the students in the audience made some very good decisions this is a graph of the number of major environmental laws passed in the United States per decade since the 1950s and what you see is the 1960s 70s and 80s were the heyday of passing environmental laws some of your younger may not even realize what these laws did this is a picture of air pollution in Beijing today believe it or not American cities looked like this in the 50s and 60s but they don't anymore thanks to one of those laws the Clean Air Act likewise incredibly rivers used to be so polluted in many American cities that they literally caught fire but they don't anymore thanks to the Clean Water Act so these laws worked but something has happened since then since the 1990s this country has passed no major environmental laws there has been no major progress during the lifetimes of today's students even graduate students in some cases well environmental protection threatens profits of environmentally damaging activities and some certainly by no means all but some people whose profits are threatened therefore object to environmental protection and what's happened since then is they've tricked us into not passing any laws see they can't argue that environmental protection is a bad idea or that damage to the planet is a good thing nobody's going to buy that and they can't argue that their profits are more important than the planet nobody's going to buy that so they have to take a different approach and the approach they've taken is to work behind the scenes to manipulate public debate and they do this several ways I have time to talk about four ways that were been tricked and for short to help you remember them I'm gonna refer to them as certainty freedom jobs and profit well let's begin with certainty no matter how good our understanding of an environmental problem opponents of environmental protection will argue that we just don't understand it well enough to act this has been going on with regard to climate change for decades even though well over ninety percent of qualified scientists think we do understand it well enough to act in this is a double standard in other circumstances we understand the danger of putting off decisions indefinitely if you are ill if one of your loved ones is ill you go to the physician you expect the physician to analyze the situation carefully examine the patient run the necessary tests and come up with a treatment plan but not put off years and years and years before deciding what to do running more and more and more tests because the patient could die in the mean time right students in the room I hope you choke it considered your college choices options carefully but what you didn't do is you didn't spend years and years and years at home after high school studying colleges in more and more gruesome detail right if you if my sons had done that guess what they'd be home I'd be driving them crazy right and if everybody did that all the colleges and universities would have closed right because everybody been home studying so not studying studying studying colleges so so in normal circumstances we understand that delay and indecision is dangerous it has a cost but when it comes to environmental issues we get paralyzed we made this mistake over and over we made this mistake for a long time with regard to stratospheric ozone depletion and with regard to acid rain and with regard to the health effects of smoking for decades right the the by the way the history of this is really well documented in a book called merchants of doubt' by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Connelly so we're making this mistake now with climate change this is a double standard in other circumstances we know we can't delay decisions until we have perfect understanding we need to make decisions in a timely fashion but with regard to environmental problems we get paralyzed another flawed argument that has been used as a basis for rejecting good environmental ideas are appeals to freedom when environmental protection is proposed opponents will argue that it would infringe upon freedom and the right it would infringe upon one type of freedom it would infringe upon freedom to damage the environment they never seem to mention that it would do so in order to protect freedom from environmental damage so environmental protection works exactly like the prohibition on smoking in this room because of that prohibition we're all free to breathe clean air so when you hear appeals to freedom ask yourself is the speaker or the writer only considering freedom to damage the environment are they considering all the relevant freedoms freedom to damage the environment but freedom for everybody from environmental damage we make exactly the same mistake with regard to jobs when environmental protection is proposed opponents will argue that jobs will be lost in affected industries nowadays one hears this most often with regard to attempts to shift to clean renewable energy sources opponents argue this is a disparage this as a war on coal a war on coal well I don't mean to make light of lost jobs however in that particular instance for example there are already more jobs in the solar energy industry than in the coal industry right so if somebody is really motivated by jobs they ought to be an enthusiast for solar power again this is a double standard the folks that object to environmental protection don't object to other societal developments and initiatives that cause job losses for example they don't object to entrepreneurship or technological innovation but entrepreneurship and technological innovation lead to new products and industries which make old products obsolete and put old industries out of business but you won't hear any complaints about that just jobs lost from environmental protection even if more jobs are being created as a result of the Environmental Protection and the last one of these double standards that I'd like to mention is insistence to Environmental Protection turn a short-term profit as if it were say a business investment in expanding a toy factory or a smartphone app now sometimes environmental protection does turn a short-term profit for example this college Austin College has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half over the last several years nearly half in the course of doing that we've saved almost not quite but almost a half a million dollars a year well how is that possible well you see in part of the way we've cut the greenhouse gas emissions is to learn to use efficient energy more efficiently in running the buildings and so we don't have to buy as much energy and because we're not to buy as much energy we save money so we've cut our greenhouse gas emissions and save money at the same time it wasn't very hard but we good environmental protection ideas can be rejected if they're required to have an immediate cash profit like that often society important societal decisions require an upfront investment and then a payoff over the long term again this is a double standard we don't expect major decisions in other contexts to turn a short-term profit we don't expect grade schools to turn a short-term profit we don't expect basic medical research to turn a short-term profit we certainly don't expect space exploration to turn a short-term profit if we did only wealthy children would have schools to go to and we wouldn't do any basic medical research to cure any diseases and we wouldn't be talking about whether we could escape to Mars because we wouldn't do any space exploration so this is a fourth double standard so I've talked about four objections that are used as a basis for rejecting good environmental protection ideas fortunately my parents generation didn't fall for these arguments or our cities would still look like Beijing does today so my task for you is to watch for these arguments when you hear them point them out to others because as long as these tricks continue to work will continue to fail to make good environmental decisions and continue to grind away at the planets life support capacity but once the tricks no longer work Environmental Protection progress will resume so I want to leave you with two final thoughts the first one is this is actually good news we could make a great deal of progress if we would simply reject biased arguments and double standards and thereby make wiser decisions and finally I think our country could use some sort of noble challenge to get behind and I can't think of anything better than leaving our descendants all of our descendants and everybody's descendants a healthy planet thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 281,569

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science (hard), Environment, Green, Law, Pollution

Id: xo-jvH_Wlmk

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017