“You’re evacuating, right?” I tapped out on my phone in September 2022.
Hurricane Ian was bearing down on Fort Myers, Fla. My father, a Florida native and seasoned shelter-in-place hurricane survivor, texted me his grab-and-go list as he fled his home there: important paperwork, the dog, two outfits. “I’m not taking any chances with this one,” he said.
Days later—when the debris was finally cleared from the roads—we learned just how devastating this one had been. The roof of his concrete riverside bungalow was still there. Two walls held it up. Everything inside the house was gone, and every house on the block had been swept through.
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I was six months into my second astronomy postdoc then—the culmination of more than a decade of work. I had overcome the odds, summited the mountain of academia to gain a place at the forefront of exoplanet science. We had celebrated my success on my last trip to my father’s house, as the golden trail of a Cape Canaveral rocket ripped a seam through the darkening skies. But even then, I had begun to wonder if my place among the stars meant that I was too far from Earth.
When I think of climate change, I see the shoebox full of things my dad found on the lawn—a waterlogged photograph of me at 11, a $2 bill in a Ziploc bag.
Those of us born after 1977 have never seen a cooler-than-average year. Since then, the frequency of major hurricanes has doubled, and the incidence of wildfires in northern and central California has quintupled. My generation—those who grew up with the now silenced clamor of insects and memories of snow days that don’t seem to come around as often anymore—is neither the first nor the last to sound the alarm on our rapidly changing planet. The sirens have been wailing for decades.
You might think as a scientist I’d be especially attuned to the facts and figures and the dire future they portend. But after a while the sirens fade into the background, and the numbers start to run together. When I think of climate change, I do not think about the data. I think about the shoebox full of things my dad found on the lawn—two tuba mouthpieces, a waterlogged photograph of me at 11, a $2 bill in a Ziploc bag. I think about the big coat I bought when I moved to Indiana for graduate school that I never wore after my first year because every winter was warmer than the last. I think about the portable air-conditioning unit I had to buy when I moved to Tacoma, Wash., a city that wasn’t built to endure sweltering summers.
Most of all, I think about those to come after me. Before Hurricane Ian, I had never questioned whether I was doing good in the world. Of course, I was contributing as an astronomer—it felt noble, studying what we can never touch or use, science simply for the sake of curiosity. But afterward, I had to ask myself whether it was enough. I could no longer shake the feeling that I was so occupied by other planets that I couldn’t see the problems on mine.
Ominous storm clouds loom over NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral, Fla. In coming decades, climate change will likely make such sights much more common.
Tom Pennington/Getty Images
As astronomers quietly ask themselves about the value of our federally funded science in a disastrously warming world, we must face the reality that the nation’s highest halls of power will echo with those questions as well. Just this year Beltway policymakers sought cuts to both the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, ones so severe that they would all but shutter the former. Such cuts are a product, in part, of growing pressures already constraining the budgets of NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other major public sources of funding for space science.
We must, then, consider the fate of our multibillion-dollar journeys into the solar system in a world increasingly subject to multibillion-dollar disasters. Although the projected spending peak has already passed for NASA’s latest orbital eye to the sky— the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to launch in 2027—the space agency has even grander plans on the horizon. They include the Artemis Program, which costs more than $7 billion annually, as well as an effort to retrieve rock samples from Mars that is currently undergoing a “back to the drawing board” replan after being deemed too expensive. But the project many astronomers are most excited about is NASA’s next great space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), slated to launch in the early 2040s after a multidecadal development at a projected cost of some $11 billion.
Here’s the problem: by the 2040s the world as we know it now will no longer exist. And with those multibillion-dollar crises on the rise—being just one category from climate change’s myriad possibilities for fiscal ruin—funding for fixes must come from somewhere. In the 1980s natural disasters that cost more than $1 billion (inflation-adjusted) occurred at an average rate of 3.1 per year, with 297 annual deaths, compared with 17.8 events per year in 2017–2021, with 911 annual deaths.
Might Roman be NASA’s final foray into ambitious orbital observatories? Will HWO make it, unscathed, to its notional launchpad later this century? The cost for each of the space missions so many of us love is comparable to that of a single climate disaster, a single recovery from an event that now can occur more than 20 times a year. As such calamities become commonplace, space science might begin to look like a luxury we can no longer afford.
Staving off climate change’s worst effects falls most immediately on the national governments and multinational corporations—fossil-fuel companies chief among them—that collectively brought us to this impasse. But after decades of “top-down” failures, we must take matters into our own hands—to push our warming world and ourselves onto a better trajectory from the “bottom up.”
Today, for better or worse, my father’s house has been rebuilt just as it was, 20 feet from the water, awaiting the next “once in a century” storm. But I have uprooted myself. I left my second postdoc—gave away my textbooks, parceled out my in-progress research, closed out my tab-clogged web browser for the last time—and traded it all in for an adjunct professorship. Now I spend my days teaching whoever walks into my classroom about not just the stars above but how they are connected to the Earth below.
Astronomy is a joy—a miraculous expression of a universe seeking to know itself. I want to see new astronauts on the moon. I want to learn whether Mars once had life. I want to know whether we’re not alone in the galaxy. All this—and much more—is possible, but the prospects diminish as our global ecosystem degrades. For every step we take to defend that joy, we must take another to defend our climate. Each of us should pause to think about what that looks like for ourselves and our communities. But not for too long—we can leave a better future for those to come only by acting now.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.