• Question: If the damage we've done to the planet is irreversible and resources are running out, shouldn't we be focusing the majority of scientific research on ways to slow down the impact and effects of our actions?

    Asked by claudia98 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 12 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Yes, we need to dedicate lots of our efforts to this – and we are! But even the stuff that we think is unrelated might help us find solutions. For example, people researching space propulsion may help us find new energy sources that would be cheap and would not pollute much. And many of my colleagues at NASA don’t work on sending stuff to other planets…. instead, they spend all their time putting things in orbit around Earth to watch the planet’s health and find out what we need to do better.

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Climate change is just one of the problems we’re facing right now and there are people trying to understand exactly what our input to it has been and if we can forecast what will happen to inform politicians and world leaders to do something about combating it. It’s really the political issues that are difficult and also people don’t want to have to drastically change their lifestyle, imagine giving up having a computer for instance!

      Like I say there are other problems like cancer research, predicting and protecting against earthquakes, hurricanes, even space weather like solar storms. And we have scientists working on all these things. But as Shawn says we need to unrelated research as well: abstract science has lead to some of the most important developments in the last century or so e.g. quantum physics about understand the properties of atoms lead eventually to basically all the electronics we now use. The guys could never have conceived that at the time, so we need to think outside the box even if we’re not sure it’s going to directly benefit us right now.

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      You’re quite right that more effort should be put into slowing down the rate at which we’re ruining the planet. However, we already know what a lot of the problems are and still aren’t doing much about it. Some of these are really simple, but if everyone did them things would be a lot better.

      For example I bike or walk to work, I don’t buy things that have heaps of packaging around them, I buy meat from my local butcher, it’s commonly cows I could see out my window at home! That way I never even have a chance of ending up with horse meat from Europe when I make burgers…

      I agree with Martin that it’s tied up in politics too, governments are too focussed on appearing to be good now, rather than caring about the future of the planet.
      g

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