Related papers: Astronomy, Doughnuts, and Carrying Capacity
The shell bound by the Karman line at a height of 80 to 100km above the Earth's surface, and Geosynchronous Orbit, at 36,000km, is defined as the orbital space surrounding the Earth. It is within this region, and especially in Low Earth…
The recent growth of the space sector, spurred by a surge in private actors, has led to a sharp increase in our ability to address societal challenges through space data. However, this has exacerbated an already critical situation in space:…
Space faces significant sustainability issues including orbital congestion and debris accumulation. The continued growth of space operations, accelerated by advancements such as reusable launch systems, further intensifies these pressures.…
Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…
We explore how questions related to developing a sustainable human civilization can be cast in terms of astrobiology. In particular we show how ongoing astrobiological studies of the coupled relationship between life, planets and their…
The technical achievements of our civilization are accompanied by certain negative consequences affect the near-Earth space. The problem of clogging of near-Earth space by "space debris" as purely theoretical arose essentially as soon as…
The importance of computing in astronomy continues to increase, and so is its impact on the environment. When analyzing data or performing simulations, most researchers raise concerns about the time to reach a solution rather than its…
Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global…
The rapid launch of hundreds of thousands of satellites into Low Earth Orbit will significantly alter our view of the sky and raise concerns about the sustainability of Earth's orbital space. A new framework for sustainable space…
The increasing number of Anthropogenic Space Objects (ASOs) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) poses a threat to the safety and sustainability of the space environment. Multiple companies are planning to launch large constellations of hundreds or…
Terrestrial exoplanets are on the verge of joining the ranks of astronomically accessible objects. Interpreting their observable characteristics, and informing decisions on instrument design and use, will hinge on the ability to model these…
Much of today's sustainability discourse emphasizes efficiency, clean technologies, and smart systems, but largely underestimates fundamental physical constraints relating to energy-matter interactions. These constraints stem from the fact…
The Planetary Boundary for Climate Change has been surpassed, and humanity must therefore decide on a pathway back to the safe operating space below the Planetary boundaries to minimise the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic…
Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global…
I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…
The carbon footprint of astronomical research is an increasingly topical issue. From a comparison of existing literature, we infer an annual per capita carbon footprint of several tens of tonnes of CO$_2$ equivalents for an average person…
The increasing recognition of the association between adverse human health conditions and many environmental substances as well as processes has led to the need to monitor them. An important problem that arises in environmental statistics…
Human activities degrade the Earth environment at an unprecedented scale and pace, threatening Earth-system stability, resilience and life-support functions. We can of course deny the facts, get angry about them, or try to bargain. Or we…
The current IAU definition of "planet" is problematic because it is vague and excludes exoplanets. Here, we describe aspects of quantitative planetary taxonomy and examine the results of unsupervised clustering of Solar System bodies to…
This work proposes to model the space environment as a stochastic dynamic network where each node is a group of objects of a given class, or species, and their relationship is represented by stochastic links. A set of stochastic dynamic…