The Problem Everyone Is Bored Of Listening

Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are trying to provide a solution to an inevitable problem: Humanity’s thirst for growth and the endless exploitation of natural resources will eventually ‘finish off’ our planet and there is a chance we may become extinct(not to mention the 8.7 million other species).

According to these wealthy men, if our species is present and thriving on other planets, it won’t be filtered out by evolution after some time.

Texts written in the last 300 years imagine the universe filled with different kinds of humanoids and rich elements, not with infinitely empty, barren and uninhabitable planets.

The recent realization that our species could go extinct, and our beautiful planet could one day be non-livable for whatever reason, motivated scholars to think about settling outside, evolving into the dream of galactic colonization.

In the middle of an unpredictable pandemic, climate crisis, global unrest and inequality, a couple of extremely wealthy men took space rides in their multi-million dollar spaceships.

The efforts may seem like vanity projects, but there is underlying motivation to colonize space, a galactic goal that has surfaced in the last century.

• In our quest to conquer space, we have messed up and ignored our home planet, which is a great vessel by itself.
• Planet Earth is a big spaceship with millions of species, plenty of water, plant life and heat from the nearby sun.
• We still don’t know much about the millions of life forms already present here, who form a complex network of behaviours to provide us with food, herbs, water, air and beauty.
• Nature’s balance and sophistication are unparalleled, and it is us who have been exploiting and eroding our planet for many centuries.

• The discovery of the atom’s inherent power provided hope to many scientists that they could build powerful rockets that can reach beyond our solar system.
• Russian rocketeer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote about using nuclear-powered devices to settle inside asteroids, migrating to other solar systems.
• In 1902, Nikolai Fedorov predicted 2021, by stating that rich people may infect other planets by their exploitative zeal.
• Many such texts were almost religious, pushing for our species to spread life in a lonely, infinitely empty universe.

Before we venture into colonizing the galaxy, pushed by overzealous, egocentric billionaires, we could fix urgent problems on our own planet.

Problems like the climate crisis, social justice, human trafficking, hyper-capitalism and inequality can only be solved by humanity-wide projects and not by whimsical, rich men.