“This festival is placed under the sign of sobriety, of the awareness of the need to transform our societies to save the planet. It is in these terms that the president of the Fleurance Astronomy Festival, Bruno Monflier, launched the Gers event, the 33rd edition of which is being held until August 11. Just after him, the mayor of the city of Gers, Ronny Guardia-Mazzoleni, spoke at length about climate change, before local deputies and senators deplored the abandonment of a bill on green industry. Yet this is a festival of astronomy, not ecology!
A paradox that is not really a paradox: with the acceleration of climate change, astronomers and astrophysicists have found themselves faced with a strange observation. First of all, they are among the victims of these changes, because the pollution of the atmosphere prevents many of their observations. But on the other hand, they too are responsible for this situation with the maintenance of a polluting industry whose benefits are not always obvious. “Today, we cannot escape the environmental question, assures Jürgen Knödlseder, CNRS astrophysicist present at the festival. No activity can avoid the question of its impact, and that includes space. »
Opening the meeting, another astrophysicist, François Forget, who has worked on several Mars missions in particular, raised the question: what if we abandon part of the sector? “When it comes to Earth observation activities, pretty much everyone agrees that it has a use for it. But for robotic or, worse, human exploration, it’s trickier. The researcher went so far as to ask the audience, “Would you rather fund a mission that yields evidence of extraterrestrial life, or one that drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions?” »
While human exploration is expensive, it remains a creator of climate activists. Many astronauts returning from missions have been marked by the vision of the Earth, lonely and fragile in space. This “overview effect” has prompted many explorers, like Thomas Pesquet, to get involved in the environmental cause.
“There is an awareness spreading among scientists as well,” describes Jürgen Knödlseder. It is not yet everywhere, but the voice is increasingly loud on this subject, including at the level of institutions. It is also illustrated within the festival itself: in order to know how much an event of this type pollutes, the researcher calculates its carbon footprint. And we summarize the first estimates: “There are the buildings, the air conditioning, etc. But the biggest part is the public. People who come by car, eat meat there… These are things that can be improved in many ways. Throughout the week, Jürgen Knödlseder is available to festival-goers so that everyone can make their own assessment and find a way to improve.
Meanwhile, missions into the unknown of the Universe, like the James-Webb Space Telescope, are ever more ambitious, which may leave a question: what’s the point in a dying world? “Spatial is sometimes useless, recognized François Forget. Like an opera or a work of art. There may be an irrational aspect, but that’s also humanity. »
