The flame is not what anyone here is worried about. 16 million lbs of force applied to disintegrating concrete results in a lot of chunks of heavy material launched at supersonic speeds at random, low flying trajectories away from the launch site. See this picture of the damaged fuel tanks, which are (for obvious reasons) much further from the launch site than this telephoto picture would have you believe:

https://twitter.com/EmpiricalEnergy/status/16490948480776110...

Chalk it up as a necessary evil or negative externality of a far greater good.

The benefits of these experiments will yield orders of magnitude better results for humanity than sitting still.

Walk away from Omelas if you want, but most of us are here to watch us reach the stars.

Humans and the planet we inhabit are a stepping stone to the infinite cosmos.

Or we can build a goddamn flame trench like they should have done in the first place.

What are the benefits to humanity of these "experiments", exactly?

As far as I can tell, they are doing nothing but accelerating damage to Earth's environment and ecosystems in order to reach a, quite literally, dead planet. It doesn't make any sense if you step outside of the hype bubble and cult of personality.

All life on this planet will eventually come to an end. We should reach for the stars. Evolve beyond these bodies bound to the gasses and nutrients of our gravity well. Conquer death, explore the universe.

Earth is just an egg, and humans just one step in a longer story that will play out among the stars.

On the geologic scale, everything you and I know is already gone, dead and forgotten. But what comes of our world may endure forever.

That practically reads like religious prophecy. Yeech

Nothing religious about wanting more than this short stupid primate life.

That's actually exactly what religion sells

Small chunks of debris flinging a few hundred feet from a rocket are well within the realm of anticipated ordinary risks of any rocket launch. It is effectively a missile or bomb with the amount of fuel that's loaded into it, it could do far worse like explode on the ground. That's why observers have to sit like 2-3 miles away.