Les Johnson, Greg Matloff, and C Bangs have a new book out:
New Nonfiction ‘Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth’ Looks to
Space Exploration, Technologies to Solve Earthly Challenges
In the nonfiction work Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth, catastrophic threats to our civilization and way of life abound. Food and energy resources dwindle. Climate change looms. Tumbling space rocks threaten devastation or outright extinction.
But solutions to these very real challenges exist, the book’s authors contend, thanks to new technologies and scientific discoveries made possible by space exploration — and still more to come as humanity extends its reach ever further into the solar system.
Newly published by Springer, “Harvesting Space” is exhaustively researched and written by Greg Matloff, a physicist and retired associate professor at the New York City College of Technology and former NASA Faculty Fellow and consultant C Bangs, an ecological artist and former NASA Faculty Fellow; and Les Johnson, co-author of the science fiction novels Back to the Moon and the forthcoming Rescue Mode, and a physicist and technologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. It is the second edition of the trio’s 2010 work, Paradise Regained: The Regreening of Earth.
“Gloom and doom sells,” writes award-winning science fiction author Jack McDevitt in his foreword to the volume — but the “Harvesting Space” authors remain distinctly sanguine in their approach to their unsettling subject matter, objectively addressing global challenges from overpopulation and dwindling resources to the threat of an extinction-level event caused by a rogue comet or meteor.
The book pairs themes of environmentalism and exploration, championing good stewardship of the Earth and calling for greater investment in missions of discovery into the solar system. The writers illustrate potential solutions in clear, unambiguous language, demonstrating how technologies and capabilities derived from space exploration can slow, and even reverse, centuries of resource mismanagement across the globe.
“We should feel far from hopeless,” the authors assert. Their recommendation? Time to seek out the untapped resources all around us: “We merely have to move a few hundred kilometers straight up into space to access … a literal universe of energy, raw materials and real estate.”
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Kindle and paperback editions are available on Amazon.com.