“You’re evacuating, right?” I tapped out on my phone late one summer morning in September 2022.
Hurricane Ian was bearing down on Ft. 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 the 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. Cars were in the river. The lovely couple next door had been washed off their roof; rescuers found them days later clinging to debris in a nearby canal.
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I was six months into my second astronomy postdoc then—the culmination of over a decade of work. I had overcome the odds, summited the mountain of academia to gain a place at the forefront of exoplanet science. All my dreams hung on the giant golden mirrors of NASA’s multibillion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which had returned its first stunning images only weeks prior. 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 the Earth.
Not all of us grew up in this world, but we all live in it now. Those of us born after 1977 have never seen a cooler-than-average year. Since then the frequency of major hurricanes has doubled; while the incidence of wildfires in northern and central California 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, then, that 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 don’t think about the jagged, falling slopes of ice-loss plots, or the way global temperature maps have new colors, or the silent tick-tick-tick of atmospheric carbon dioxide approaching the point of no return. I think about the shoebox full of things my dad found on the lawn—two tuba mouthpieces, a water-logged 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 grad school that I never wore after my first year because every winter was warmer than the last. I think about the portable air conditioner 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 afterwards, I had to ask myself whether it was enough. I could no longer shake the feeling that my work was insufficient, that I was so occupied by other planets that I couldn’t see the problems on mine.
While 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 policy makers have 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 space-science funding.
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 over $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, 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 disasters on the rise—being just one category from climate change’s myriad possibilities for fiscal ruin—funding for fixes has to come from somewhere. In the 1980s, natural disasters that cost over $1 billion (inflation-adjusted) occurred at an average rate of 3.1 per year, with 297 annual deaths, compared to 17.8 events per year in 2017–2021, with 911 annual deaths.
So—could JWST be the last time the U.S. spends so much on a space telescope? Might Roman be NASA’s final foray into ambitious orbital observatories? Will HWO make it, unscathed, to its notional launch pad later this century? The cost for each of the space missions so many of us love and cherish—from the telescopes gazing back to the beginnings of time to the spacecraft scouring the solar system for extraterrestrial life to the rockets powering a human return to the moon—is comparable to that of a single climate disaster, a single recovery from an event that now can occur over 20 times a year. As calamities become commonplace, space science may 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.” Yes, we must vote in our elections and with our dollars. But we must also find the bravery to follow those at the forefront of the fight, who are putting their lives and livelihoods on the line when they engage in acts of civil disobedience against the ecocidal status quo.
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 not just about 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 if Mars once had life. I want to know if 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 only leave a better future for those to come 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.