There’s No Money in Space
By MARTIN REZNY
What a sad story that was. No, wait, what a sad reality it is. Maybe you’re one of the many people who think that space program is just an enormous drain on finances, in which case, please allow me to try and expand your horizons. Thinking that exploration of space would be worth it only if it can make a profit is like thinking that discovering a new continent is worth it only if you can bring back lots of gold.
Not even with the intention of doing anything practical with the gold, mind you, just because you arbitrarily decided it is valuable. By that logic, it might have as well been seashells or unicorn horns. You may have noticed that the Europeans did a bit more with America than just robbing local people of gold and silver. New continent offered them plenty of land and resources, a new place to live. Not to mention new lifeforms and civilizations to discover. And that’s just what they already expected to find.
Furthermore, the process of exploration and colonization was itself a driving force of innovation, both technological and cultural. The discovery of the New World in the physical sense brought about the rise of a world of new ideas and new ways of life. I find it therefore endlessly ironic that Americans, of all people, would decide that all that exploration nonsense is just a waste of time. Maybe they should sell the continent back to the natives, then, and sail back to Europe.
There were certainly mistakes made and atrocities committed in the course of that era of exploration, some of which were preventable (the genocides), others just unfortunate (the epidemics). But neither of those is something we have to repeat. The point of pushing onto the next frontier remains the same —the world we live in is finite, rest of space pretty much isn’t. Reachable rocks out there not being currently habitable is just another challenge, not a reason to quit trying.
Because you need to realize one fundamental cosmic truth — you can’t breathe money, you can’t drink money, you can’t eat money, you can’t build things out of money, and you sure as hell can’t live on the surface of money. In short, nobody needs money, everyone needs know how, work, land and resources. Space maybe requires lots of the former two, but it is chock full of the latter two. For example, if you towed a single medium sized core asteroid to Earth’s orbit, you’d have more rare earths in there than what all of humanity has mined so far.
You know, they’re called “rare earths” because they are rare on Earth, not because they’re rare in space. But before you think that this is a way to get rich, it isn’t, not really. Only if someone has total monopoly on space mining. If you brought so many rare materials at once, their price would plummet. Like diamonds — on Earth, valuable, in space, worthless. Except these are common even on Earth, that’s how a resource monopoly artificially creates monetary “value” (yes, I’m looking at you, De Beers).
So please, do not even start with the invisible hand, supply and demand, “money is just a way to express relative value of things to make them exchangeable” line of argumentation. I’m talking about the practice of using money, not about its theoretical utopian ideal form. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t, it just doesn’t because people don’t demand what’s the best for anyone, and because every established power seeks to manipulate money and turn it into an instrument of social control over population.
If money worked as a problem solving technology, the global economy would not be leaving billions in famine, disease, and poverty, while the minority of people on Earth wastes all kinds of vital resources. Newsflash, humans have the technology to feed everyone. If money worked, the global economy would not be exploding all ecosystems and climates on Earth. We know we are doing it, but we simply can’t stop the money ruining the planet even further, as if money was an actual supervillain.
If money worked, people would pay to have a space program, because there’s no investment more rational in the universe than funding the exploration of the universe, where more of everything just hangs around, practically begging to be taken and used. As far as we know right now, there isn’t even anyone we would have to take the stuff from this time around. We would just have to stop making wars for five minutes and focus on getting stuff done (don’t worry, we can resume the wars once we rule space; it would only make them much cooler, anyway).
Sarcasm aside, humanity simply cannot advance to the next level, whatever that might be, on the backs of individuals getting returns on their investments. How do I know? It’s not happening, that’s how I know. Yes there are private entrepreneurs, having recently some pretty big trouble just getting into orbit. And orbit is child’s play, compared to where NASA has been just so far, on a pittance. What were the returns? For instance, a difference between having a global satellite network, including GPS service, and not having it. How much is that worth, according to you?
I think it’s priceless. You cannot put a price tag on something like that, just like stopping an asteroid from hitting Earth would be worth all the money in the world. Or discovering life elsewhere. Or having a backup planet. And we’re not talking about it costing all the money, we’re talking inconvenience levels of rich people being able to afford one less yacht. The leading “rocket” scientists today even have ideas on how to build a real FTL drive, and what do we do? Spend more money at McDonald’s.
And that’s where I’d like to end this article — exploration of space is, above all else, about getting a better perspective on the things down here. Just try to imagine the solar system is your playground, and then judge how big our problems are, how great our accomplishments, and what’s the true value of the money in your pocket, weighed against the future survival of human race.
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