Our need to feel special, or at least not insignificant-not to mention to explain why we're here and aware of it-once drove us to create grand myths about how everything around us was created for our benefit. Musk? Or does it make me rational?Īllow me to suggest an alternative: What if we all continued to live on Earth, a planet almost perfectly designed to allow our species to survive and thrive? Well, it might appear to be designed that way to us, a race of beings exceptionally prone to hubris and delusional beliefs about our own transcendent importance. Ask the Biosphere folks what that's like.ĭoes all this make me a Luddite? A killjoy? An anti-futurist? A pawn in the game lacking the vision of Mr. Going to space is one thing, but living out there on a rival rock? These places have none of the natural ingredients to sustain human life-in particular, air you can breathe-and living there suggests the prospect of inhabiting some sort of bubble sheltering you from the unforgiving elements in a cold and barren landscape. By all accounts, Mars is a real shithole. The undercurrent of all this is that it will someday be necessary, desirable, or both for a large number of human beings to live beyond Earth. It was a giant leap towards interstellar civilization, where humans will bring our particular enthusiasms to solar systems beyond our own. This was the bold first step towards humans not just regularly visiting, but inhabiting the Moon and Mars, we were told. But what struck me about CNN's coverage of the event-many outlets took the whole thing live-was how much Space Colony Talk there was going on. We can wonder what it means for a society already so unequal and so atomized. We can roll out the standard laments about how what used to be a collective civilizational quest to reach a new frontier has become the purview of individual men who have become so rich they essentially operate as nation-states unto themselves. There's some cool technology here-the craft, known as the New Shepard, is fully reusable and operates without a pilot-and human beings reaching for the stars is never to be pooh-poohed. Instead, he's been selling $1 billion in Amazon stock per year and pumping it into Blue Origin, his space-rocket firm, which on Tuesday launched Jeff Bezos and three others 62 miles up-beyond Earth's atmosphere, if not quite into outer-space proper. Poverty? Hunger? Homelessness? Disease? Paying your workers a fair wage, or at least giving them a bathroom break? Paying taxes? None of these seemed to occur to an American oligarch. At the time, Bezos had $131 billion in holdings according to Forbes-much of it unrealized gains, a very important distinction indeed-and he just came out and said he couldn't find anything within Earth's atmosphere to spend it on. "That is basically it." The allusions to Gil Scott Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" write themselves. "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," Jeff Bezos said in 2018.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |