Billionaires, Dick Rockets, and Earthseed

Let’s talk about the billionaire space race (referred to hereafter as the BS race).

These are men who have gotten obscenely wealthy off the labor of other people.
They use various tax avoidance schemes and teams of accountants and lawyers to ensure that they pay a much smaller fraction of their earnings in taxes than you or I do.
They have grown their obscene wealth to new astronomical heights on the back of a global pandemic.
And now they are shooting themselves into space to see who can be first, and who can go the farthest.

This is, understandably, pissing a lot of people off. And people are just getting more pissed off whenever any of these chuckleheads open their mouths, like when a certain billionaire with a dick-shaped rocket thanked Amazon employees and customers, saying they were the ones who paid for the trip into space:

I am also pissed off. But I want to push back on certain lines of thinking that I have seen reflected in the pushback towards the billionaires. Not because the billionaires shouldn’t get pushback, but because I think the focus of the pushback should be different.

A quick perusal of the tweets about the BS race will lead a person to find dozens, if not hundreds, of people expressing a sentiment like:

Or:

Or:

While I understand this attitude, I think it is wrong on several fronts:

1) I don’t want Jeffery Bezos or Elon Musk to fix the opioid crisis. Or dangerously neglected infrastructure. Or world hunger.

Now, to be clear, I want to fix all of these things. And I want wealthy people want to use their wealth and resources to be a part of that solution. But I have a real problem with the idea of private citizen billionaires being the ones spearheading the project.

First, because fixing these systemic issues in our society requires policy changes and fixing local, national, and global systems, and the idea of a private citizen or corporation dictating to governments what they should do in this regard is a very troubling idea. (I know, I live in the US where that kind of shit happens all the time, but if you scale the amount of money up and scale the size and wealth of the government and its associated nation down, and you have the ability of having billionaire with entire governments in their pockets.)

Second, we need to find a way to fix issues like this WITHOUT relying on the benevolence of billionaires. If we create a system that requires both their existence and benevolence, then we will be disincentivized to prevent them from using their money to reshape society however they see fit. Plus, I don’t think it is good for society generally to view the wealthiest among us as heroes and saviors.

Third, a lot of their money is ill-gotten gains. Which brings me to the second issue I have with the sentiment above.

2) We shouldn’t act like the problem with billionaires is that they are spending their money wrong when they shouldn’t have a lot of that money in the first place.

You don’t reach the heights reached by Bezos, Musk, and others by treating others fairly and justly. You reach them by exploiting people. So a lot of their wealth should rightfully belong to the people they exploited.

Additionally, as was mentioned before, they use a whole host of tax avoidance schemes to pay next to nothing in taxes, despite the fact that the US taxes the ultra-wealthy at laughably low rates anyway. So a large portion of their wealth should belong to the government in the form of taxes.

So before we consider what billionaires should or shouldn’t do with their money, they should have to give up all the money that has been unjustly gained and returned to its rightful owners.

(Before going on to point three, I just want to acknowledge that a lot of the tweets expressing frustration at the BS race are calling for billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes, or to pay their employees a living wage. But there are still plenty that wish that billionaires would compete in ways that the people tweeting see as more beneficial for humanity.)

3) The problem is not that we are continuing space exploration. It is that billionaires and private corporations are leading the charge.

This is the point at which my view diverges most sharply from those whose tweets I’ve described above.

Many people have, for as long as there has been a space program in this country, considered it a frivolous waste of money when we have so many problems here on the Earth that need our attention. And I get it. Why are we extending ourselves in ways that do not directly address the basic needs of people when very real issues are going unaddressed?

The idea that not only space exploration, but space colonization, should be an impetus for society even in the face of extreme problems on Earth is explored in the Parable series, by Octavia Butler.

In them, the main character, Lauren Olamina, creates a new religion called Earthseed. The core belief of Earthseed is that the one constant in the universe is change, and therefore, God is change. We cannot stop change, but we can learn to shape and direct it when we can, and adapt to it when we can’t. And Lauren believes that, because change is inevitable, the only way we can ensure the continuation of the human species into the future is to spread out among the stars, so our fate is not tied to the health of a single planet, or even a single solar system.

She is challenged on this particular tenet of her religion, that as a society we should be focused on propagating out to distant stars, more often than any of the others. It is the one that is hardest for people to accept. But she is adamant in its importance. She argues that, not only is spreading out among the stars humanity’s best chance at long-term survival, but that striving for it benefits us here and now in two important ways: First, it is a common purpose that would unite society, and second, it drives innovation.

Now, I will leave it up to you as to whether you think spreading out among the stars should be a primary long-term goal for us as a species. But the other two things, that space exploration gives society a common purpose to rally around and that it is an impetus for innovation, are things that we have already seen in our own space program.

The Apollo program brought us together as a nation to a degree that very few events that weren’t driven by violence or tragedy ever have. And that unity and common purpose can even cross national boundaries, resulting in projects like the International Space Station.

And achieving these amazing feats was only possible because people discovered new ways to think about the world, about technology, about everything. That innovation, made possible by the aspirational goals of the space program, is what put a man on the moon, put a rover on Mars, and put a space station in orbit that has been continuously inhabited for over 20 years. And along the way, all this innovation has resulted in technologies that help better our everyday lives, like these NASA spinoff technologies developed by NASA that then were made publicly available.

Of course, if billionaires and corporations are the driving force behind space exploration, then all of the technology and innovation will be privately owned and patented. This will make these new technologies, many of which may be useful in helping to solve the issues we have here on Earth, less accessible, or at least will mean that the level of access will be at the mercy of those looking to turn a profit from the ideas.

But as we enter into the next stage of space exploration, where we have permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars, and we begin to mine asteroids, it is even more important that governments or international coalitions be in charge. Because when we start having people be permanent residents of non-Earth settlements, we need to make sure that a government has jurisdiction over these places. Otherwise, we end up with privately owned settlements out of the reach of government regulators whose residents don’t really have a way to leave. And we cannot let that be the future of space exploration; otherwise, something that could help humanity reach new heights could be twisted for the creation of a corporatocratic dystopian hellscape.

And that is why we should oppose the BS race.