With human exploitation leading to resources becoming
increasingly scarce on earth, scientists are advocating that the
solar system should be saved from the same fate. As reported by The Guardian, scientists are
calling for up to 85 percent of the solar system to be preserved as
'space wilderness' to protect it from human exploration.
Martin Elvis, senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said,
“If we don’t think about this now, we will go ahead as
we always have, and in a few hundred years we will face an extreme
crisis, much worse than we have on Earth now.”
In recent years, space mining companies have set their sights on
mining everything from water on the moon to iron and minerals in
asteroids. In the UK, the Asteroid Mining Corporation (AMC) is
“on a mission to exploit the potential of an off-Earth
commercial market.” Any move to protect outer space akin the
environmental protections on Earth would vastly
