A new Space Race is the wrong answer to the wrong question
The discussion about moving to space highlights that we have already overpassed the planetary boundaries
There is a growing trend, especially in USA. More and more high-tech, super-rich, Silicon Valley billionaires propose that the solutions for some of the Earth’s most important problems should be found outside our planet. Here are some examples.
The solution for climate change, since we, as humans, are not capable to coordinate and act in time, is to move all the heavily polluting industries to space. “I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off-planet,” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said. “In space, you get solar power all the time. So there’ll be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry.”
In a similar way, Elon Musk believes that the colonization of March is necessary. “I really think there are two fundamental paths [for humans]: One path is we stay on Earth forever, and some eventual extinction event wipes us out…The alternative is, become a spacefaring and multi-planetary species”.
Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama pushed towards the utilization of asteroid’s resources. Trump did it recently through his proposal for NASA’s budget. Obama was the one who signed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, the framework that allows US companies to extract and own any materials they find in non-earth resources. In 2014, the financial services site Motley Fool estimated the mineral wealth of the moon to be between $150 quadrillion and $500 quadrillion.
My view is that trying to resolve climate change and resource scarcity problems in space is the Wrong Answer to the question “what should we do without changing the current economic system too much?”. But this is the wrong answer to a 100% wrong question.
We should be ambitious
On the one side, all these bold statements and ambitions are a strong proof for the technological advances of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and of course, for the almost endless human ingenuity. Most probably, none of those visionary efforts will be realized within next 5–10 years. However, none of them seems impossible, instead all of them are visible evolutions of current technological advances, taking into consideration the current exponential growth of engineering technologies that are powered by artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of Things. The 4th industrial revolution does not only improve resource efficiency and drives new unimaginable products. Most importantly, it opens new horizons and options, it redefines completely what should be considered as resources as well as products. As I have already written “We are living in the era of the biggest, the fastest and the most game-changing transformation of our human societies. It is not difficult to feel the new, unimaginable opportunities for making sustainability a cornerstone of each and every industrial sector.”
On the other side, the same bold ambitions, highlight two very pessimistic conclusions, one for climate change and one for circular economy.
About Climate Change
If the only solution is to move heavy industries and whole cities in space to avoid a human extinction, then Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos agree with what environmental activists say for many years: our response to climate change is too slow, too weak, too business-biased and too late. But this conclusion can stimulate two completely different responses. The first is to multiply the efforts for a global, urgent, and much more ambitious effort to tackle climate change. Actually, this is the main conclusion of a recent scientific paper that proposed a Moore’s law for cutting carbon emissions. According this paper, a plan to halve carbon emissions every decade, while green energy continues to double every five years, provides maybe the only simple but rigorous roadmap to tackle climate change. The scientists that authored the paper believe that it is still possible to avoid an extinction-like event or climate shift, although serious damages are unavoidable. The other possible response is to accept that humanity can’t change its route towards a super-hot era, thus the only thing we can do is to identify how many and who must be saved (by moving them to space, in a like Noah’s ark way). We all realize that moving to space will not be a free ticket for all of us, and most probably it will not be an option for at least 99% of the population. In this view, a serious discussion for moving to space legalizes the unsocial, unethical, and catastrophic right of the super-rich to impose their framework for the planet: it’s preferable to destroy the planet rather to change our status.
About Circular Economy
The shift to asteroids and Moon mining is an alternative route to circular economy. It seems that this alternative is much more attractive for many business sectors because it continues their current dominant model: linear economy. Thus, for me, it is obvious that asteroids mining undermines circular economy.
While EU tries to close the loops, and optimize the use of limited resources to manage the upcoming resource scarcity and stimulate a circular economy, USA set the scene for exploiting resources beyond Earth’s limits as a mean to pave the way for private companies to own any natural resources they manage to mine from asteroids. If you look it from a certain perspective it makes sense. Instead of the serious disruption of changing the business models and developing closed — loops landscapes, mining in Moon and asteroids would allow and stretch the dominance of the linear model. It would also prolong the dominance of the current strong stakeholders, maybe allowing much higher profitability under resource scarcity conditions. In addition, maybe it would provide a new attractive way to spend the trillions that are looking for investments with high returns in the current global financial crisis and instability. A small detail: it will result in a devastated planet, but you know, the scope of work of the current dominant business models is to provide profits for the stakeholders — the planet is not involved in them.
This discussion could be completely theoretical, but it’s not. Because the ones that push towards moving to space are the ones that can shift decades or even hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the relevant research and commercialization of the technologies involved. Overall, it seems to me that the discussion about moving to space highlights something very important: the recognition that we are already very close, or maybe we have overpassed, the so-called planetary boundaries. It also urges us to overpass and manage the social limits and restrictions that do not allow us to shift the planet for the benefit of the 99% of its population…
