https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-fl...
Data: Us burns about 390,000,000 gallons of gas per day.
SpaceX Falcon9 uses about 38,000 gallons of RP-1.
390000000/86400 = 4513 (gallons per second of fuel in the US).
38,000/4500 = 8.4 seconds.
On the day this launches, it will represent about 0.0097% of the fuel used for that day in the US.
There are about 280 cars in this photo: https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/ibimg/hgm/450x253-1/100/226/parking-...
If you printed out this image 40 times, you could delete ONE car from this image for one day. That's the difference that this launch will make.
Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than the amount of CO2 you get when you burn it. Most sources/uses of it are a net positive in terms of greenhouse effect.
The Raptor engine uses a propellant mixture (methalox = liquid methane + liquid oxygen) that is slightly fuel rich. In other words, the reaction resultants are not just CO2 and H2O, but CH4 as well. Since CH4 is a very potent greenhouse gas (the EPA says it's 25 times more potent than CO2), this makes a difference.
Anyway, here's the numbers: the mass of the propellant is about 500 tons, and the mass of the equivalent CO2 emissions is about 650 tons per flight.
For comparison, the humankind puts about 30 billion tons of CO2 in the air every year. A Boeing 777 flight puts about 500 tons on a long haul trip.
"continuation of the species" is an arbitrary, and arguably pointless, goal though. I think we should be aiming higher than that. If exploring the universe is a possibility then a trillion people might well be necessary - the universe is a big space. Heck, we'll probably need a trillion times that number.
> Hate to be that guy but
will give some readers immediate negative connotations (i.e. that you are in fact 'that guy'). Asking the question without the 'that guy' preamble might still be seen as an off-topic downer but may have raised fewer hackles amongst the downvoters.
Perhaps.