Let's clean up this mess before we leave the planet

Having taken a magnificent and pristine planet and set about reducing it to a rubbish dump, humancruel is now seeking an escape hatch.

People for whom I would normally have some respect, like Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are among the ringleaders in suggesting that, after defiling Earth, we should all go off and do the same to Mars or some other hapless planet.

Hawking, who has just turned 75, is a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump and has slammed his stance on climate change from a dizzy height. I have no quibble with that.

What I do take issue with is, firstly, the notion that it will all be Trump’s fault if Earth turns into a Venus (an unimaginably inhospitable and uninhabitable hot spot) and, secondly, that the only way to “save” humanity is to get off Earth.

Running out of space

“We have given our planet the disastrous gift of climate change,” Hawking reportedly said at Norway’s Starmus science and art festival in June this year. “When we have reached similar crises, there has usually been somewhere else to colonise… But there is no new world, no Utopia around the corner. We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”

That would be the Moon and Mars for starters, and possibly the planet known as Proxima b, as well as planets yet undiscovered.

God forbid.

I expect better from a physicist like Hawking, internationally applauded for his brilliant work (not that I could understand any of it).

All of us learnt as little kids that if we made a mess, we had to clean it up.

That’s what we need to be doing now, not getting ready to start all over again in some pure and untouched part of the Universe.

As for the claim that Trump’s policies will tip Earth over the edge, well, maybe they will. But then we’ve been teetering on the brink for quite a while now, haven’t we? Just the tiniest flick of a finger would be enough to finish things off.

I have no time for Trump and pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement was dumb, but if Earth falls into the abyss, then humanity should fall with it.

As I once tweeted back to Richard Branson when he was boasting about Virgin’s Galactic’s latest strides in developing commercial spacecraft: Let’s clean up the mess we’ve made here first.