Four humans recently looped around the Moon. Their vessel, an Artemis capsule, was a thin metal shell whose life-support system kept them alive: it provided a carefully balanced atmosphere, a closed water loop, a finite supply of food and a means for disposing human waste. The life support was not optional. It was a necessity.

Consider this: not once in the history of human spaceflight has an astronaut been known to tamper with their life support system. No one has ever decided to vent some oxygen for fun. No one has argued for a personal right to increase their CO₂ output. Sabotage is unthinkable – socially intolerable. Their fellow crew members and mission control would intervene immediately.

We are doing to our planetary life support what no astronaut has done to theirs. We are damaging it – venting carbon, acidifying the oceans, stripping topsoil and collapsing biodiversity – not maliciously, but with a shrug. It is legal. It is profitable. And in most circles, it is entirely socially acceptable.

The Victorian novelist George Eliot would have understood why. In Middlemarch, she showed us a town that preferred a satisfying, simple myth (that a charismatic quack can cure ills) over difficult, complex truths (the role of germs, statistics, slow........

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