Space Wars

Forest and Bird, Volume 20, Issue 4, 1 November 1989, Page 6

Space Wars

T HE IMPLICATIONS of a war in space just above earth are horrendous. Astronaut and author Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, says there will never be a second war in space. "Let me tell you why. It only takes a simple calculation to determine this. All aerospace engineers understand the problem. You only need a few million pounds of matter, broken up into tiny pellets of a one-gram size, to make the near reaches of space uninhabitable. If we explode a few pieces of equipment up there, the equivalent of eight million pounds (the size of the Saturn launch vehicle, the kind I went to the moon on), into onegram particles distributed through the first 1000 km of space, there is no way any spacecraft will be able to survive in space for more than a few days. "Should this come to pass, it will prevent future generations from using space at all. They would not be able to get out into deep space. It would be like running through a hail of bullets. It doesn’t seem sensible that in the first 100 years of using the space environment, we should make decisions and commit acts that will prevent future generations from a proper use of that environment."

Wilderness Distribution by Continent

*This is really one contiguous block divided into two for biogeographical purposes. Wilderness Distribution by Biomes

Continent Antarctica North America Africa Soviet Union Asia South America Australasia Europe Km2 13,208,983 9,077,418 8,232,382 7,520,219 3,775,858 3,745,971 2,370,567 138,563 % 100 37.5 27.5 33.6 13.6 20.8 Zh 2.8 No. of areas Pigs 85 434 182 144 90 91 11

Biome Tundra Communities Warm deserts/Semi-deserts Temperate Needleleaf Forests Tropical Humid Forests Mixed Mountain Deserts Cold-winter Deserts Tropical Dry Forests Tropical Grasslands/Savannas Temperate Rainforests Temperate Broadleaf Forests Temperate Grasslands Evergreen Sclerophyllous Forests Mixed Island Systems Km2 20,047,533 9,329,531 8,799,312 3,006,855 1,478,494 1,478,494 1,424,099 735,331 420,215 290,646 272,016 170,885 91,647 48,069,951 41.5 19.5 18.3 ro | ok 3.0 1.5 0.9 0.6 0.6 0.4 0.2 100 Count 100 389 120 77 51 51 120 33 15 20 24 1,039