The Earth is undergoing rapid climate change, humans are utilizing Earth's resources at an unprecedented rate. If the human population continues this way, we will see ourselves in even more trouble very soon. Matloff, Bangs and Johnson present a different type of solution to some of our climate-change and resource use issues upon the Earth; Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth gives plausible ideas for resource use from space and technology placed in space to assist those on Earth.
The bulk of the book acts as a primer on understanding basic scientific principles, our solar system, the evolution of life on Earth, human's use of the Earth, and climate change principles; all of this however goes to support their thesis that we need to stop polluting and using resources from the Earth and instead carry out processes, harvest resources and use technology in space. Since I studied most of this in school, it was a review for me, but it is written in a way that those not well-versed in science can easily understand. The ideas for harvesting resources from space and using space-based technology to help us on Earth were very interesting to me. In the book the authors describe two camps, and I easily fall into the environmentalist side, where I use less resources, reduce pollution and recycle everything. The author's side of the coin, space advocates, can work with my side, but their ideas were very out of the box for me. One of the proposed ideas was to place heavy industry and pollution-creating processes in a place that is inhospitable to life, like the moon. This idea is hard for me to come to terms with, not because of it's plausibility, but because of it's impact. One of the ideas I liked more was harvesting resources from Near Earth Objects, asteroids and comets that may contain up to a year's worth of iron in one object. These NEO's have also been shown to contain nickel, platinum, copper and gold. Some of these objects might come close to hitting the Earth and would have to be moved off that trajectory, the author's motto of "If we gotta move them, why not use them?" seems very wise. I was also highly intrigued by using solar shade and Dyson dots in space as a way of mitigating the climate change that is already happening. Of course, the catch and cost of these technologies was discussed. Overall, Harvesting Space offers new ideas that need to be readily explored and put into place in order to avoid the environmental downfall that humans are heading towards. ( )