YP Letters: Time to fix the Earth before we walk in space

From: Allan Ramsay, Radcliffe Moor Road. Radcliffe.
ESA astronaut Tim Peake seen on his first-ever spacewalk after having replaced a faulty voltage regulator on the International Space Station.  The image comes from his colleague spacewalker Tim Kopra's helmet-mounted camera.ESA astronaut Tim Peake seen on his first-ever spacewalk after having replaced a faulty voltage regulator on the International Space Station.  The image comes from his colleague spacewalker Tim Kopra's helmet-mounted camera.
ESA astronaut Tim Peake seen on his first-ever spacewalk after having replaced a faulty voltage regulator on the International Space Station. The image comes from his colleague spacewalker Tim Kopra's helmet-mounted camera.

AS I watched Major Tim Peake’s space walk live, it was interrupted by an ad break. First came one for Save the Children: No Child Born to Die, where it asked for just £2 a month to ‘buy tools and seeds’. Next came one for a TV documentary – Liberators of Dachau – where survivors of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich speak about their personal experiences on camera for the first time.

Given Neil Armstrong’s words – “one giant leap for mankind” – on landing on the moon some 45 years ago, why have we got so much poverty and starvation, global warming and a war against terrorists?

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Prior to Tim Peake’s space walk, an astronaut who’d already completed a successful one, used terms like “human ingenuity” and “space age technology”.

Would it be fair to say that, in the so called civilised world, the human race is a “rat race” which takes place on our roads?

In Britain alone, reducing road traffic casualties would save billions of pounds which could then be used to save the NHS, and give hospital staff a better deal. Then take global warming, floods, conflict and millions of starving children, and I find it near impossible to see any benefit to humankind from Tim Peake’s space walk.

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