SARS, not visiting Mars, should be the priority for human survival

Watching videos of the landing on Mars last February of NASA’s Perseverance rover, recently given fresh topicality by the equally successful landing of China’s Zhurong vehicle, offered much material for reflection. In an achievement that would have startled Einstein, NASA engineers had sent a spacecraft on a seven-month journey of 293 million miles, to land undamaged at the target spot they had selected. No wonder there was jubilation among the NASA team.

Yet there was a strange anomaly. Some of the team members were not present in the NASA control room, but were watching from home. The celebrating scientists and engineers, even at the point when they discovered success had been fully achieved, did not perform the customary “high fives”, or back-slap, or hug. Instead, they very gingerly touched clenched knuckles and all of them were masked throughout the taxing experience of monitoring the Mars landing, due to Covid.

Was there ever a more significant contradiction? These masters of the universe who had just conquered space and imported their technology onto another world were, on their own planet, prisoners of a tiny virus visible only through a microscope and going in fear of their lives. The phrase “Physician, heal thyself” comes to mind. It was a spectacle that invited radical reappraisal of our behaviour and priorities.

What is the point of promoting space exploration, in a spirit of curiosity, if we cannot protect life on our own planet? Covid-19 has so far killed 3.7 million people, though that is almost certainly a considerable underestimate. Of those deaths, more than 600,000 have occurred in the United States, the most scientifically advanced nation on earth, representing the largest death toll of any country – the same nation that is leading the exploration of the universe.

In the light of that anomaly, who can credibly claim that mankind is conquering its environment? With the wisdom of hindsight, might we not have been better advised to devote much of the ingenuity and resources devoted to space exploration to an intensive, focused and long-term programme to conquer coronaviruses and similar health threats? The SARS outbreak in 2003 and the later MERS alarm triggered a sense of urgency and accelerated research; but once the perceived threat passed, the anti-coronavirus drive was wound down.

That was a serious mistake. Those smaller outbreaks should have been taken as a warning and concentrated minds, both in the scientific and pharmacological communities. It is important for governments to incentivise Big Pharma to focus on such threats and the best way to do that is to guarantee its ability to make a reasonable profit from preparing for and addressing pandemic emergencies, taking a cautious approach to such drastic steps as patent waivers, a state intrusion into intellectual property rights that could eventually prove counterproductive.

Another major health threat, due to irresponsible human behaviour, is the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These are now killing more than 35,000 people a year in the United States. Over-prescription and, insanely, the squandering of this precious human resource on agricultural use – 80 per cent of antibiotics sold in America are for use on animals – are preparing a nightmare, regressive future, when people will die of infections that have not been fatal since the Middle Ages. Already, globally, 700,000 people die from this growing menace each year and that figure is forecast to rise to 10 million by 2050.

Could we possibly lower our sights from the desert landscape of Mars and take some time to address this menace? Again, it is up to governments to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to focus on this and similar threats. Yet this is not an argument for abandoning space exploration, rather for raising some earthbound issues to equivalent prominence. The economics of the space race can be deceptive.

The headline figure that, since its inception in 1958, NASA has spent a cumulative total, adjusted for inflation via the GDP deflator index, of $1.19 trillion, or an average of $18bn per year, is more rhetorical than fiscal. Its actual budget for this year, a 12 per cent increase on 2020, amounts to $25.2bn. The Mars budget is $2.8bn over a decade. With Joe Biden currently dispensing largesse of more than $6 trillion, it is difficult to denounce the budget of an agency that is both increasing human knowledge and promoting western security.

Beyond that, it is even arguable that NASA is self-funding, or actually makes a profit, through its impact on the US economy. A report by the Space Foundation estimated that, as long ago as 2005, NASA contributed £180bn to the American economy, 60 per cent of it created by commercial goods and services devised by companies related to space technology. By-products of space research include GPS, weather satellites and dialysis machines. It should be noted, however, that there are another eight US government space budgets outside NASA, so the overall space economy is complex to unravel.

But if there is little justification for reducing the space budget to fund medical research, there is another, much more obvious candidate for cutting down to size, the ultimate dripping roast – the massive mountain of cash allocated to the climate Grande Peur and its central mirage: Net Zero. Future historians will surely identify the third decade of the 21st century as a period of mass insanity, especially in global ruling circles.

Despite the hype, there has been no incontestable evidence produced that ongoing climate change, a constant feature of nature, is on a scale to threaten human existence, or even seriously to discommode us. The climate alarmist lobby, by silencing all dissent, has discredited itself. There is no scientific consensus on an existential threat from climate change nor, more particularly, that such a putative extinction event is driven by man-made emissions.

Initially, the scare-mongering seemed credible. But, as deadlines passed for dire events (in 2007 the Arctic was forecast to be ice-free by September 2013 – the specifying of the month lent a pleasing note of forensic accuracy to this computer-game fantasy), some of the public grew sceptical. The IPCC ignored claims made by dissident scientists – that water vapour accounts for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, that CO2 is responsible for only 3.6 per cent, that just 0.28 per cent of the greenhouse effect is man-made and, within that, man-made CO2 accounts for 0.117 per cent of the greenhouse effect.

Were the dissenters right? We are not allowed to know. All the commanding heights in climate discourse are occupied by alarmists, ramping up the rhetoric. Greta Thunberg was just the most obvious example of the cult-like atmosphere of the Green hysteria. Now, however, things are becoming serious, not in terms of global warming but as regards the exorbitant amounts of money that governments are preparing to throw at a vastly exaggerated problem.

Net Zero is unaffordable. That is the sole certainty amid the extravagant dystopia being pumped out of climate models with an impressive track record of being consistently wrong. The entire energy ecosystem of the world is about to be wrecked. Green fanatics cannot wait to decommission existing, reliable energy sources and replace them with unreliable renewables. We face a future of disruption in energy generation, with dire consequences for homes and business productivity. The Luddites have taken charge of Industry 4.0.

It does not require a computer model to forecast that, initially, the public will submit from habit to the Green impositions until, taxed unbearably, compelled to buy electric cars, to remove gas boilers and install bankrupting substitutes, and provoked by escalating energy costs, they will put an end to the whole nonsense, by which time living standards will have declined, with possibly catastrophic consequences in the developing world. A study by National Grid ESO estimates that the cost to the UK of reaching net zero by 2050 would be between £2.8 trillion and £3 trillion.

More credible threats to life on earth are posed by potential meteor strikes or the eruption of a super-volcano; the latter phenomenon could cool the world for a decade, making conventional food production impossible – an extinction event. There is presently no technology for countering either of those hazards, but if the same energy, funding and enlistment of talent that fuelled the space programme were devoted to intensive research, some solutions might emerge.

Or are we just going to put our hands in our pockets, whistle and congratulate ourselves on achieving a 38 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions when the meteor strikes? We need a process of scientific triage to prioritise research to avert disasters, viral, bacterial and natural. Western society is going through an exceptional period of  extreme foolishness, in which governments are leading actors. Sceptics note that the same people who tell us authoritatively that we face extinction from climate change also believe, equally prescriptively, that human beings can change sex.

The video films of Mars, portraying a landscape that makes parts of Glasgow seem attractive, actually present the most favourable image of the planet, since they do not convey the deadly radiation, the toxic dust storms or the minus 73C nocturnal temperatures. The notion of colonising such a hellhole seems bizarre, but with a Chinese presence on the Red Planet, America will feel compelled to continue exploration. It was the pioneering activities in space of the Soviet Union that galvanised America to compete: geopolitics is a main consideration.

Fair enough, and all credit to the talents and hard work that produced the achievement that is Perseverance. But still the telling image of those masked scientists, facing a lethal threat from a virus at the height of their success, reminds us of the Icarus-like fragility of human aspirations, unless we prioritise our response to existential threats.