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It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes. I can see why people got excited about it in the 1960s, back when the world was young and we still thought there might be little green people out there – who wouldn’t want to meet them? Most serious opinion, however, has now settled on the “Where is everybody?” paradox first framed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If there is intelligent life anywhere, why has it not sought to make contact? It’s because there isn’t. There’s nothing out there except planets infinitely less beautiful than this one we live on.

All that seems pretty uncontroversial, and I almost never mention it, except for when astronauts yet again pointlessly go into space, as with the latest moon mission. Here’s what I’ve noticed: people get really annoyed. I have loads of opinions way more vexatious than that one, yet none of them attract the same ire. Everyone’s annoyed for a different reason – some of them think I’m deliberately setting out to ruin a festivity; others act as though I’m opposing innovation and modernity, which I absolutely am not. They point to all the discoveries that wouldn’t have been made without the space-based wanderlust, most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other, and then they mourn the kind of world I want to live in, where nobody can see beyond their own horizon.

Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves, which couldn’t be more wrong – I’m sure they’re great; they certainly seem wholesome. Some people think I’m being a scrooge, resenting the financial outlay because my soul has no poetry in it. It’s a paradox, and not a delicious one, that moaning about the waste of energy that is space travel has turned into quite a significant waste of my own energy. Seriously, Nasa, can you not just knock it off? Hasn’t the US, of all nations, got bigger things to worry about?

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist