

Technology development is related to time. I feel like that sounds sarcastic, but I don’t mean it to be.
If we approached deep space flight anew in three hundred years after working on non internal combustion engines for other purposes in that time, we’d probably be much better able to reduce the total emissions from space flight than if we work on it continuously for the next hundred years, even if we reach zero emissions in a shorter timeframe that way.
The same is true for material sciences and trying to figure out how to reduce the level of metallic ions released into the ozone layer by spacecrafts. Hell, we’ll probably have more advanced international cooperation in three hundred years and language education/translation software, giving us a better ability to respond to an emergency in space.




Yeah, at least normally resources are depleted by the number of organisms, not the greed of a few examples, but this is not a new thing.