As the Planet Warms, Our Universe Could Slowly Fade From View

Toni Santana-Ros is an asteroid hunter. 

At nightfall, after the day’s final scenes of flamingo sunbeams fade to black, he peers up at the sky to watch space rocks swimming along our solar system’s gravitational tides. Sometimes, he sees shards casually cruising next to Earth, greeting telescopes with a gentle “hey,” never to be observed again. But occasionally, he catches one on a crash course with our delicate blue orb. 

Last year, Santana-Ros, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, sprang into action when astronomers realized an asteroid named 2022 WJ1 was headed straight for the border of Canada and the US. With barely four hours on the clock, he mustered his team to help pinpoint how menacing this asteroid would be. What towns would it threaten? Would it be like the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub or merely make a “plop” sound before sinking into a sturdy body of water? 

“Luckily,” he concluded, “the object was small and just produced a spectacular fireball.”

But what if such a time-sensitive asteroid warning had been sent out in November 2020, when Santana-Ros’ telescopes were shut down because of bushfires ravaging the region and covering lenses with inky layers of ash? Or in February of 2021, when bushfire debris made its way into some telescopes, forcing astronomers to dismount instruments and pull blobs of soot from them after the wind settled? 

“Climate change is already affecting astronomy and my work,” Santana-Ros said. 

Time and again, studies have shown that climate change is leading to an increase in wildfire occurrence and severity as the years go by. With our present greenhouse gas emission trajectory, some models even predict that the risk of very large wildfires in the US will increase sixfold by the middle of the century.

During his telescope shutdowns, Santana-Ros said, he’d received the interruption news while comfortably at home. “There was no big drama.” 

But those blazes prevented his team from using telescopes for a few weeks. 

“The bottom line here is that this time we were lucky and we missed just some regular observations,” he said. “Next time, we might be facing a real threat.”

An astronomical problem

Over the last few decades, climate change has altered our relationship with Earth. 

Global industries still burn coal to make cheap power, diffuse dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere, force our planet to heat up, and ultimately fuel devastation like the wildfires responsible for the interruption of Santana-Ros’ research. Meanwhile, scientists are trying to learn how to shelter endangered animals left without homes because deforestation has ruined wildlife habitats, as well as how to deal with cyclones tearing apart coastal villages. 

It’s almost like we aren’t part of our planet anymore, no longer blended into its environment like the oak trees and butterflies with which we share cosmic material. It’s as if we’re fighting to regain our rightful place as Earthlings. 

But amid such chaos, astronomers are starting to think about another heartbreaking angle to the crisis. Not only has our relationship with Earth grown fraught, but climate change could stain our relationship with the…