David Mackay

I was a frustrated astronaut all my life. I grew up at a time when space seemed to have no boundaries, and lots of us presumed humans would be living on the moon and landing on Mars.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say __uclear is a money pit_ or __e have a huge amount of wave and wind._ The trouble with this sort of language is that it__ not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one __uge_ compares with another __uge,_ namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.