David Kipping

And so it has been argued that if you live on a super earth, you may be forced to live there forever.

There may be no escape unless you invent a space elevator or something, but then how do you even build the infrastructure in space to do something like that in the absence of a successful rocket program?

And so the more and more we look at our earth and think about the sorts of problems we're

more you see things about the Earth which make it ideally suited in so many regards, it's almost spooky that we not only live on a planet which has the right conditions for life, for intelligent life, a sustained fossil fuel industry just happens to be in the ground.

We have plenty of fossil fuels to get our industrial revolution going, but also the chemical energy contained within those fossil fuels

and hydrogen and other fuels, it's sufficient that we have the ability to escape our planetary atmosphere and planetary gravity to have a space program.

And we also happen to have a celestial body which is just within reach, the Moon, which doesn't also necessarily have to be true.

Were the Moon not there,

what effect would that have had on our aspirations of a space program in the 1960s?

Would there have ever been a space race to Mars or to Venus?

It's a much harder, certainly for a human program, that seems almost impossible with 1960s technology to imagine ever come to fruition.

Yeah, and the same with climate change, perhaps.

I mean, climate change is the next major problem facing our civilization.

But we know it is technically surmountable.

It does seem sometimes like there has been a series of challenges laid out to progress us towards a mature civilization that can one day perhaps expand to the stars.

Okay.

But yes, climate change.

Plenty of milestones that we need to cross.

And we can argue about the severity of each of them.

But there is no doubt that we live in a world that has serious challenges that are pushing our intellects and our will to the limit of...