The Forbidden Void: Cases Against Space

For most of us, space exploration seems like a no-brainer. By venturing out into the cosmic ocean, we advance our technology, unravel the secrets of our universe and further ensure the long term survival of the human race. Not everyone's on board, however. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore some past and present arguments against space exploration.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. From housetop Work
Dot Cargo. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I am Christian Sagar.
We're going to kick off here with a quote from
the late great Carl Sagan sort of set the tone

(00:23):
for this episode. We were wanderers from the beginning, from
nine percent of the tenure of humans on Earth, we
were hunters and foragers, wandering on the savannahs and the steps.
Even after four hundred generations in villages and cities, we
still remember. The open road still calls like an almost

(00:44):
forgotten song of childhood. We invest far off places with
a certain romance. The appeal I suspect has been meticulously
crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our
long term survival. That was a a lark, Carl Sagan.
I'm all right, like I said, I think uh, I
think Chuck has the best one in the house. Toufforts. Yeah,

(01:07):
I like that. I was. I was sitting here giggling
the whole time, tracking not to laugh into the microphone.
So that's an appropriate quote for us to start this
episode with, because we are going to be talking today
about all well, not all, but various anti space exploration movements,
whether they be religious, political, economic, Uh, there's there's a

(01:31):
largic Yeah, yeah, it turns out there's quite a bit
of them. And uh, you know, I don't think we'd
classify Carl Sagan as being among them, obviously, no, but
he kind of sets the stage I think by like that.
That's a quote from him that kind of captures the
overall optimism for space and enthusiasm for space that you know,
I want to definitely get out there for my own part,

(01:51):
I'm I am definitely a space optimist of space enthusiast.
I think there are several key arguments for space exploration
and our investment in space exploration. I mean, namely, uh,
you know, pushing the technology, ensuring the long term survival
of the human race, and giving us the ability to
even protect the planet like in the in movies. As
I've said before, saving the world is an everyday occurrence

(02:14):
for hero but to actually save the world, our ability
to protect the planet from near Earth objects, from meteorites, comments, etcetera,
like that is as close as we can realistically get
to saving the planet in a short term, tangible way
against mass extinction. I think if you had asked me

(02:36):
before we did all the research for this episode, I
would have said something similar. And now I'm on the fence. Uh. And,
which is sad to me because in personal anecdote, like
I grew up as a little kid, I wanted to
be an astronaut. That was like my thing as a
long kid, and my parents bought me all those books
of like you know, those like giant like uh um

(02:58):
fold up books of like the interior of the Space
Shuttle looks like, or like how to become an astronaut,
stuff like that. Uh. And I remember very specifically being
a kindergartener in the classroom. I was in New Hampshire
at the time when the Challenger exploded, and Christie mcculloff
was a New Hampshire teacher that was aboard the Challenger,

(03:21):
and so at the time it was you know, a
really big deal is super upsetting, and but I was
still like so into the whole astronaut thing. Uh. And
now look at me now, I you know, I talked
about science on podcasts and write horror stories about demons.
I I don't know if I ever achieved my dreams.
You're rarely go into space at all. No, No, it's

(03:43):
it's few and far between. I got to talk to
uh Elon Musk and Richard Branson about that, but yeah,
I don't know, Like reading all of this information, I
got to say, there are some compelling arguments against it too,
I would agree. And you know, I think the important
thing about this because some of you might be listening
and you're you're thinking, you're like me, You're like, oh,
I'm I'm already one board space question and I'm not

(04:06):
really interested in the counter arguments. But I think it's
it's healthy to explore the arguments against the things that
we value, because hey, that gives you a chance to,
you know, hold on a little tighter, do the things
you do believe in, question the things you believe in,
and you know, maybe end up with a more balanced perspective.
I agree, And after you know, going through this and

(04:26):
what we're going to present to you today, I can
tell you that they're there are definitely like like weak
points in the armor of both of the arguments that
sort of make you go, okay, like maybe we could
refine this here. They're like, let's let's really nail down
why we're going into space and then like for some
of the arguments against it too, like they need to

(04:48):
be refined as well. You know, it's a little a
little loose sometimes, especially like so the one that really
got us got the ball rolling for us on this
was an article that we're going to talk about at
the end of the podcast that is called the Manifesto
from the Committee to Abolish Outer Space. And it reads

(05:08):
like a total like farcical, dadist sort of I don't know,
anti capitalist manifesto sort of joke from the nineteen seventies, right, Um,
but there is some like if you read real deeply
on it, there is some logic between the lines. But yeah,
you know, I thought it was worth reading through to

(05:29):
promote discussion. Yeah, yeah, totally. And that's why this is
ultimately all about. We're we're gonna provide you with some arguments.
You take those, combine them with what you already know,
which already believe, and then you can give us feedback
on how that may have changed your viewpoint, how that
caused you to double down any viewpoint, etcetera. So, before
we dive into the various sort of categories of anti

(05:50):
space arguments, there was one article that I read that
i'd like to use as like a cap off for
us to start with. And this was written in by
a guy named Gary Westfall, and it's called The Case
against Space uh. And it's in it's it's actually in
a science fiction journal called Science Fiction Studies. Uh. It
was issued seventy two. If you want to go look

(06:10):
it up. Um. And he basically says, look like, I'm
part of the sci fi community. I love science fiction.
I'm a science fiction writer. I teach science fiction. Uh.
And I have been in love with the idea of
going to space for decades now, but lately, like my
enthusiasm for it has waned. Uh. And he says there

(06:31):
have been different supportive arguments for space travel in recent
error eras right, So you can sort of break it
down from the fifties and sixties to the seventies and
eighties and then up to his point in the nineties.
And I think as we go on today, we'll see
some more in the the ats and the teens that
we're existing in now. But uh, he said, the fifties

(06:51):
and the sixties, they were all philosophical arguments, right, humanity
must venture into an occupy outer space so that we
can fulfill our inherent drive for exploration and inhabit unknown realms.
Not because it is easy, that it is hard. Oh yeah,
Well Kennedy didn't have a Boston accent. He had a
he had a Kennedy accent. Yeah, but I can try.

(07:14):
Uh you know what. No, I'm not gonna I could
do his brother. I had a bad ice cube anyways. Okay,
But to continue on, this is basically like the Star
Trek argument, right, like like a new life, new civilizations, YadA, YadA.
It's kind of a manifest destiny kind of yeah. Yeah,

(07:35):
which is a good way to put it. Um. In short,
he says, this is an exact quote. In short, the
history of our species powerfully suggests that progress will come
from continued stable life on Earth and that a vast
new program of travel into space will lead to a
new period of human stagnation. And interestingly enough, he then

(07:56):
quotes the exact quote that you put above from Carl Sagan.
Then he says, Okay, then in the seventies and eighties
was shifted right because the whole philosophical thing wasn't really
working out anymore, and it became a practical economic argument,
and it was something like this that outer space will
solve our many problems, uh, the ones that are confronting

(08:16):
us here on Earth, and that people will step forward
to solve these problems and we're gonna make a lot
of money doing it. It's kind of an industrial uh
trickle down economics kind of you, which sort of velcrow
as the star. Right, look at this. We have velcro
because of space, And isn't your life better because of velcro?
Velcro is perfect? Yeah, I forgot all about that. Uh,

(08:40):
I'm gonna like it's just gonna be us thinking about
like all the like space stuff from our childhood, like velcrow,
tang and like freeze dried ice cream suppose. Yeah. Um,
But here's his quote about that one. He says, thus,
when people were unmoved by calls to fulfill the basic
destiny of manity, which is the exploration one, it was

(09:02):
hoped that the magnetic allure of the dollar sign would
draw them into the space camp. And they were talking
about everything from gathering free energy from the Sun to
mining key metals on the moon, building space factories that
would make big money, developing and selling life saving medicine
and devices. And that is something that's going to come
up later in this podcast as well. Then in the

(09:23):
nineties we switched again, right, And this is what I
like to call the Armageddon argument, which is basically the
movie Armageddon. We need to go into space for defensive
reasons and for prevention. We need to make sure a
massive asteroid doesn't strike Earth and kill all of us,
or even better, we move into space. The asteroid can

(09:43):
hit Earth and destroy if it doesn't matter because we've
colonized other planets, right And I that's one that I
especially think it's still a very compelling argumentation. It's a
big picture argument. And that's one of the things about
any of this because when you're trying when you're looking
at space, you're talk thinking about you're talking about space exportation,
you're talking about a massive megaproject, and you get they

(10:06):
have all these different ideas of what it means, what
the benefits are, what are the short term versus a
long term and what does it mean to see this
as an extension of culture? Yeah, yeah, I agree, And
so like I said, like I guess what I'm looking
for is by the end of this podcast that I'll
be able to be convinced back to my five year
old self who was enamored with the idea of being

(10:27):
an astronaut. But uh, Westfall basically uses the rest of
this this article to make arguments against those three cases,
um and he He basically finds that there's no compelling,
immediate reason why we should accelerate our space programs. He says, yeah,
sure would be fine for us to go into outage space,
but we've got much more pressing issues to deal with

(10:47):
here on Earth, all right, So let's segue from that
into and this was brand new to me. You educated
me on this for for this episode, that there are
religious reasons to go to space. Yeah, there or at
least the case has been made um and granted you
you don't see as much of this anymore, at least

(11:07):
in mainstream arguments. But but it's still pretty interesting. I've
been long fascinated by by space religion and the idea
like what happens to our beliefs when we actually take
them into space, or just what do we do? What
happens when we take old beliefs essentially old cosmologies, I
mean maybe even like Babylonian cosmologies, and we try to

(11:30):
hold onto those sometimes without without daring to tinker with them.
In an age of modern cosmological understanding. Very Jodorowski like
that that that's like a big theme of his and uh,
what is it meta barons and that that university sort
of created around that was a wild universe. Um. Yeah.
So so there are various examples of this. Um. You know,

(11:53):
there's some religions of Hinduism instantly comes to mind. They
have displayed an amazing ability to adapt supernatural cosmologies to
agree with new information on the nature of the universe. Um.
But other examples stand out to exemplify religions uh, sometimes
unflinching refusal to change in the face of scientific advancement. Geocentricism.

(12:13):
You know, there's no way anything but the earth can
be the center of creation. Uh. And speaking of creation creationism,
there's no there's no way that this uh, that any
of this scientific data and these these scientific theories about
the origin of species can be any different from this
ancient text that I still hope, right, Why I bother
to go looking? We know we have the gnosticism here already. Yeah. So,

(12:38):
of course, so it's not that all that surprising that
certain religious groups or certain religious individuals have spoken out
to varying degrees against space exploration and space travel or
or raise some very particular religious questions about it. UM.
One that I found very thought provoking occurred in two

(12:58):
thousand twelve, and this this came from the General Authority
of Islamic Affairs and Endowment SPATWA Committee UH. And and
I do want to to UH to clarify that this
is UH. This is just one single United Arab Emirates committee. UM.
They were not They're not speaking speaking all of Islam. UM.

(13:19):
This is just one committee speaking out here. But they
were mainly interested with what a one way mission to
Mars would mean UH from an Islamic perspective. So this
is of course the whole idea of the first settlers
to Mars are essentially on a suicide mission. Well, just
that constitutes suicide? And if so, UH does the Koran

(13:39):
speak out against it when it says do not kill
yourselves or one another. Indeed, Allah is to you've ever merciful.
And they were argumenting that, yeah, Muslims should not go
on this journey. But the but there even more remarkable
part of this was and this was brought up is
the notion that some Muslims might take the trip to
Mars in order or to quote escape punishment or standing

(14:03):
before Almighty Allah for judgment that I don't quite understand,
but I guess like I'm also not like an Islamic scholar,
but I would assume that even if they died on
the mission to Mars, they would still face judgment from
Allah well after life. That that's where it gets crazy, right,
because if you if you leave Earth, does that mean

(14:24):
you were leaving God's domain? Is each God is God
only lord over a single planet? Um? I think the
most would argue that that a that a modern depiction
of God is a God of all creations, and therefore
if you if you take him off on one world,
you can't just go to the next and claim immunity. Um.
And I think that was the the idea that that

(14:44):
one out here, But it's so much science fiction spins
off of this very simple idea that we're getting into
today of should we or shouldn't we go into space?
You know, like immediately thinking of you and I were
just talking about this book the other day, Uh, Mary
Doria Russell's book The Sparrow. Yeah, I have not read it,
but it's been on my to read list for a
while really fascinating sci fi book about you know, the

(15:08):
idea of the future sending Catholic Jesuit priests along with
a team to a new planet where they found alien
life so that they can be missionaries basically and teach
them about the Catholic faith. Uh. And of course everything
goes horribly awry, but it's it's fascinating, yeah, but it's
also sort of an argument or it ends up sort

(15:29):
of being an argument for not doing such a thing. Well, um,
we'll get the Catholics in a minute. But by my
next example comes from the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter day Saints, which, you know, a lot of people
might not think that Mormons are going to really come
up when we talk about space ready religions, but as
a relative newcomer to the religious world marketplace, Uh, they

(15:51):
were really preloaded for the space age from the beginning.
As pointed out by Roger D. Lonnia's curator of the
Smithsonian's planetary Exploration programs in his paper A Western Mormon
in Washington, d c. You have a couple of key
attributes to the Mormon faith that that make it perfect

(16:12):
for space. It's grounded in frontier religion kind of giving
back to that spirit that that that that that quote
from Sagan capture uh and uh. And so you see,
you see this idea, you know, you're gonna push the frontier. Uh,
not not only the frontiers on Earth, but you're gonna
push the frontiers in space as well. Yeah. And that

(16:32):
was primarily through a guy named Dr James C. Fletcher,
who I believe was Mormon. Uh. He was also NASA's
administrator from nineteen seventy one and nineteen seventy seven and
then again from six to nineteen eighty nine, very influential
on the Space Shuttle program and other space exploration research. Yeah,
he was big into set as well. He considered all

(16:55):
of this, uh, you know, part of his Mormon faith
that he should push these ideas because Mormon cosmology also
involves a universe full of worlds without number that are
inhabited by intelligent beings. So, in other words, earthlings are
not the only creatures in Mormon cosmology. It comes pre
loaded with the idea that yes, there are other worlds

(17:16):
under God's domain that are also liberated by the same savior,
and they have they have people on them or something
like people you know, Um, so you don't have to
worry about discovering alien life and having as much of
a uh, you know, a religious um you know, apocalypse
in the mind. So the opposite version of this in

(17:37):
like sci fi fantasy type of stuff. I have to
I don't know why, but this is just immediately popping
into my head. There's this recent storyline in the Thor
comic books where um Thor realizes that like every planet
with sentient life has its own pantheon of gods, right,
and so like he's part of the Norris pantheon of gods.

(17:58):
But he flies into space and he goes to another planet,
and it turns out like this planet had its own pantheon,
but somebody had been murdering all of their deities. So
Thor takes it upon himself to also become their new deity.
You know. Uh, it's just interesting, Like this is just
like amazing springboard for fertile, imaginative ideas for science fiction. Yeah,

(18:21):
and heed it is. Now it's interesting with with Thor
of course, because he's a part of a pantheon of
god's apposed to a monotheistic model, Yeah, which is mainly
what we're talking about here. Both the Islamic and Mormon examples.
Now to return to the Church of Latter day Saints.
Uh not. Everyone in the history of the Church has

(18:42):
been super on board with space exploration. In nineteen fifty seven,
just a few short years before the first human ventured
into space, prominent Mormon Joseph Fielding Smith remarked that quote,
it is doubtful that man will ever be permitted to
make any instrument or ship to travel through space and
visit the Moon or any distinct planet. And in nineteen

(19:03):
sixty one, the same year, the Cosmonautori Gargan made history,
I mean the first man in space. Uh. Smith further stated,
we will never get a man into space. This is
of course before before he went up. Um, we will
never get a man into his face. The Earth is
man's fear, and it was never intended that he should
get away from it. The Moon is a superior planet
to the Earth, and it was never intended that men

(19:26):
should go there. You can write it down in your
books that this will never happen. Well, boy, was he wrong,
or or maybe it's all been a lie. Right, It's
like the shin I'm surprised nothing came up about the
Shining conspiracy, the idea that we faked the moon landing.
I think that that plays into some of the attitudes
will get out, you know, the the nineteen some of

(19:47):
the early skepticisms that we could do it, and then
when we did do it, Uh, you had to double
down on your beliefs and say, well, no, way that
we actually did. I should probably explain what I mean.
I just threw that out there, like that's common knowledge
or whatever. This is more along the lines of our
our colleagues over at stuff they don't want you to know.
But so the idea that the idea goes like this,

(20:07):
well it should be noted, this is a this is
a fake conspiracy theory because they created conspiracy theory that
nearly but people fascinating the people got really into it.
You've seen about it. Yeah, So, like the the idea
goes that the moon landing and all of our space
exploration has been faked, and that in particular the moon

(20:28):
landing was shot and faked by Stanley Kubrick, and subsequently
the shining is a metaphorical thematic apology to his wife.
I think for committing the act of lying to the
public about what happened on the Moon. Yeah, it's it's
it's elaborate, and it's such a neatly constructed, elaborate conspiracy

(20:52):
theory that you can't help but find it, find it fascinating. Um.
But doubting the moon landing, that, of course, is a
very real thing. And and I do think that that
that spirit is echoed and some of the stuff we're
gonna discuss here in a bit now. I do want
to mention one more thing about Joseph Fielding Smith, and
that is that later on his um his grandson, writing

(21:13):
about about all of this, uh he uh, he made
a case that that one of the points that Smith
was making was that if you went to another world,
you've discovered that they had the same Savior, they had
the same God, and therefore you wouldn't have to have
faith anymore. That that that by visiting another planet, you
could confirm the existence of God and therefore remove the

(21:35):
importance for faith and the human experience. UM okay, I
don't like just taking that from like a sort of
like debate logical perspective. I don't know that I necessarily
agree just because another species evolved to have a monotheistic

(21:56):
religion that that confirms the existence of a God. I
don't know. I'd have to hear more. It's an it's
an interesting idea. I imagine it would require a deeper
discussion of Mormon theology. I guess, as our colleague Holly
Fry often says, I require more data. Yeah, but but
I do. I do find the Mormon faith very interesting

(22:18):
and it's in its space ready nature. Though as we've
explored here that it still doesn't mean you're gonna not
encounter some some problems when you bring your faith into
an everly, ever increasingly space age. Oh yeah, yeah, certainly.
Now some other examples here. Scientist David Rittenhouse insisted back
in seventeen seventy five that quote, the doctrine of a

(22:40):
plurality of worlds is inseparable from the principles of astronomy.
But this doctrine is still thought by some pious persons
to militate against the truths asserted by the Christian religion.
A two thousand fourteen University of dat And study found
that Evangelical Protestants are much sure Jesus will return in
the next forty years than the humans will make significant

(23:01):
strides and space exploration. Huh. That seems to me to
be one of those things that's cyclical, is that like
every generation feels like they're just on the cusp of
revelations or or whatever kind of end of the world
apocryphal story occurring. Yeah, And I mean that's just I
think the nature of any kind of you know, very
evangelic or very fundamentalist movement is that you're going to

(23:23):
be more more focused on on the short term and
the religious version of the world given, not the next life.
I don't necessarily have any problem with that so long
as like, like you said, like they're focusing on like
earthly problems, you know, taking care of earthly problems. Yeah,
they're investing in space X. And certainly that ties into
some of the secular arguments we're gonna explore this um.

(23:44):
This particular study was carried out by University of day
and Political Science Assistant Professor Joshua Ambrose Ambrosius, who used
data from the General Social Survey and three Puce surveys
to compare knowledge interest in support for space exploration among Catholics, Evangelical,
mainline Protestants, Jews, Eastern religions, and agnostics, and the key

(24:05):
findings were that that were as follows, Evangelicals, who account
for one quarter of US population, are the least knowledgeable, interested,
in supportive of space exploration. Interesting, Jews and members of
Eastern traditions are more attentive and supportive. Uh. Also, no
matter where you're talking about, clergical support is important. So Evangelicals,

(24:26):
for instance, were twice as likely to recognize the benefits
of space exploration if their pastors speak positively about science
and UM. And of all the Christian faiths, Catholics, Uh,
they seem to have the most the most openness and
so they've all read the sparrow. Yeah. Well, I mean
that Vatican has um. They have an astronomer, they have

(24:48):
they have an interest in space. They occasionally have meetings
where they discuss, Hey, what happens when we speak to
speak with aliens? So exactly. Well, I would assume that
you would be like adapt the same kind of methodologies
that you use for missionary work in other countries in
the same way as you would for first contact. Right. Yeah,

(25:11):
And and if someone wanted to get kind of critical,
and certainly this is a critical episode, you might say
that the Catholic Church historically, UH is interested in large megaprojects,
we would dubious price tags and questionable benefits for the massage. Right, Well,
they've certainly got the pocketbook capable of doing it. But yeah,

(25:32):
I mean I think that that was sort of the
argument of the Sparrow was that like in the future,
governments were wouldn't be able to fund such a thing,
so they had to turn to the Catholic Church in
order for the funding, subsequently leading to Jesuit missionaries being
included on every mission. Yeah. So I guess basically you
can you can boil all of this down by saying

(25:53):
that when you have a supernatural worldview, even if you
have just like a basic mythological background to your world view, um,
there's a there's a potential risk to it in taking
your culture into space, taking your mindset into a space age,
and so therefore there's going to be a certain amount
of resistance. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break,
and when we come back, we're gonna get into some economics.

(26:21):
All Right, we're back. We're going to discuss some economic
anti space arguments. Alright, So, as we've talked about on
the show many times before, pretty much any time we
talked about space, but I'm thinking of like our rods
from God episodes space mirrors, Like any time we talk
about launching something into space, it is super expensive, right,

(26:41):
that's right. I mean some of the figures here are
just are truly astronomical. Um, I'm gonna lay out unintended. Yeah,
I'm gonna lay out a few here. And these came
from an article UM from the Space Review. First of all,
Apollo program, this was of course one of the big
ones UM, and went for fifteen years ninety nineteen seventy three.

(27:03):
It cost twenty point four billion, and if we simply
added yearly spending all up, we were we're took looking
at a round a hundred and nine billion in modern currency. UH.
That brings that breaks down to nine point nine billion
per flight with each lunar land and costing eighteen billion dollars. UH.
Sky Lab, the Skylab space station program, that cost UH

(27:26):
two point two billion in the money of the time,
that would be a ten billion in two thousand ten dollars.
And and that was across its nine year existence nineteen
sixty six through nineteen seventy four. Meanwhile, the Space Shuttle
program cost roughly one hundred ninety eight point six billion
in two thousand ten dollars um. A lot of the
sources I was looking at this came from a two

(27:47):
thousand ten articles, so you can, you know, you can
boost that those prices a little bit in your head.
I noticed that as well though, doing the research that
a lot of this I think it takes time to
gather these this information, so we don't have a lot
of data that's like right up to like you know, June. Now,
the I S S is an entirely different scenario to
to look at. NASA may have spent the equivalent of

(28:10):
seventy two point four billion on the I S S
as of two thousand ten. So I've also read other accounts,
including some more recent ones. They'd argue that the station's
true cost is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred
and fifty billion dollars or I've also read accounts that
make an argument that it's just kind of difficult to calculate.
It might be incalculable. Wow, Yeah, I think I have

(28:31):
notes in here later on about the I S costs.
But so we'll at the when we get to those,
we can compare and contrast but that sounds right to me.
I mean it was again no pun intended, astronomically expensive.
So Westfall, the guy I brought up at the beginning,
he uh comes to the economic argument. Now. Remember this

(28:52):
is the argument that he said was primarily made in
the seventies and eighties. Right, it's worth the investment because
we're gonna make all this money, man, like all these
technologies that we create that will bring back to Earth.
It's going to be totally worth it. Uh. And he says, yeah,
but we observe a cycle in this literature, right that
they first they announced that someone has developed the quote

(29:15):
perfect plan for space exploration. Right, maybe it's a new
rocket chip or something that's cheaply ineffective. Or then other
people start to examine this perfect plan and they find
a few little problems. They go, well, wait a minute,
that rocket chip actually cost fifty times what you you
announced originally, right. Uh. And then they find oh, there's
a rate of failure. Uh, maybe we shouldn't do this yet,

(29:41):
or maybe this thing is gonna crash and scatter radioactive
dust all over Australia or something like that, right, um.
And so as these objections start to mount, the people
who proposed it in the first place stopped talking about it,
and then they immediately shift to another new perfect plan
that they talk about. So this is the cycle of
that he accounts for and argues against that you see

(30:05):
in these economic arguments that you know that like I'm
thinking right now of like Elon Musk and SpaceX right,
like that's probably the current one that we're seeing where
it's like, how we can totally do this, We're gonna
land this. What's the most recent thing, like they landed
a space rocket on a platform in the middle of
the ocean, like what like a month or two ago. Yeah,
there was a talking about the whole Dragon programmer. I

(30:27):
think it's Dragon too at this point. I wrote something
about it for how stuff works now, uh, and it's
pretty impressive technology. But yeah, this is the latest where
where the you know, the the proponents of this were saying,
this is this is how we're getting to Mars. This
is the this is the vehicle, and it just takes
further development to get it where we needed. So it's
the new perfect plan that we're working on. Yeah, essentially

(30:48):
here semi perfect. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is the
new perfect plan. Now some additional anti space arguments were
presented in Engineering and Technology magazine back in two thousand
eleven by Cornish explore U been Handbury tennyson um. And
he was taking the anti space argument in a pro
con article that was that was pretty interesting. It was

(31:08):
kind of cool. They like laid him out like right
next to each other, the pro and the con argument
at the bottom. It was sort of like, so where
how have you been convinced? Yeah? Which one? Which one
do you side with? So here a couple of quotes
here that I have to read. He says, the amount
of money being spent on space researches in the billions,
and it has achieved extraordinarily little except for a bit

(31:28):
of improved technology, which would probably have come about anyway
by other means. I guess he means that we could
have had velcro without going into space, right, Yeah, we
probably could have built velcro without also going into space. Yeah. Meanwhile,
he says, we we have no shortage of crisises here
on Earth. Economic environmental, we've got deforestation, we've got global

(31:49):
clim climate change going on. Uh. He says we should
be spending these colossal sums of money on sustainability and
management of the human population. He said, quote, if you
put the money that is wasted in in space into
the hands of climatologists, you could have lasting benefits for mankind.
I don't think space science is bad science. I just
think it's a waste of time. Yeah, And Henbury Tennyson's

(32:11):
argument is really him considering space research a gross waste
of time, money, and effort that could be used to
do other things like manage our own planet, which you know,
that's something that we we already saw in the religious arguments.
Now it's popping up again and the the economic ones.
He says, this is interesting because I had not heard
this before, and it's it sounds a little pseudo e

(32:32):
to me. But but we'll see what you and the
listeners think. He says that all civilizations collapse after five
hundred years, and that this is usually because of their
greed to development and leads to the extinction of their culture.
Uh so, I don't know. I mean, okay, sure, let's
for the sake of this argument say that that's true, um,

(32:55):
and that our ambitions towards space are a sign of
our own event will collapse, that we're we're closing in
on the end of our our time. Yeah, I mean,
I've certainly read some material about the collapse of civilizations,
and yeah, I don't think that the five year estimate
is that far off. And that being said, a collapsing

(33:17):
civilization doesn't mean now what it used to me, and like,
like used to it meant some another army is going
to rise up and defeat you, and they might solve
the early just leave an empty city behind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
whereas now we sort of just have like uh, fallen empires,
right right. But then but then space itself is I mean, granted,

(33:38):
there are a very few major players in the game,
but it is an international game, with newer players making
strides more and more every day, and that's part of
the problem, as some people argue to but both actually
they argue that it's part of the problem and what
makes it good, and we'll get into that later as well.
The last thing that he says here is because in

(33:59):
this is another thing that comes up in both sides
of the argument, because of population issues. Basically, because like
there's too many people on Earth, we should instead concentrate
all these funds that we're throwing into space exploration into
food production and rainmaking technology. I wonder what he would
have thought of Willem Reich in his Cloudbusters. But but yeah,

(34:19):
so the other the other side to that argument, as
we'll see, is basically, we should go into space because
there's a population problem, so we can get all of
these people off of Earth and colonize other planets and
take the resources from those planets. Yeah, it's like it
depends on how optimistic your view of humanities future in
space happens to be. If you think we can create um,

(34:41):
you know, arcs to send off to other planets, or
if you think that it's just so far off that
it's it's not even remotely an answer to even our
even our longer term problems. So good old stuff to
blow your mind. Regular Richard Feynman shows up in this
literature to who we have infamously talked about before in
his Bathtub Adventures or his sorry hot Tub Adventures criticizing

(35:05):
um reflexology. What episode was that on, I'm trying to
remember now. Was it on Cargo cult Science? Yes, it was,
because he coined the term cargo cultures. Yeah. His his
major thing is that human space travel and particular in
particular has never achieved any major scientific break THEWS or
had not of course during his lifetime. Yeah, that sounds

(35:27):
about right for Fineman though, and his like kind of
angle of criticism of how science is approached. But you know,
I was with him on the cargo cult science thing. Well,
you know this, this is one of those arguments that
I often find pretty compelling, and I've heard others make
it as well, And especially as the technology has advances,
we've gotten to a point where the near future technology

(35:48):
is uh, you know, perhaps even even further along than
than Fineman could have possibly imagined. You know, when we're
talking about our ability to engage with VR increased communication
between when robots, I mean, Joe and I did a
recent episode talking about some of the plans for exploring
the Jovian moons, and so many of those are predicated
on the use of probes that are been controlled by

(36:11):
this particular communication hub that's sending information back to us.
And it does make you raise the question do we
need to engage in the costly, dangerous endeavor of sending
a human out there for largely symbolic reasons like a
human concett in a steel container here on Earth and
watch this on a screen, or we can take him

(36:32):
or her and put them in an enclosed steel box
to watch it on a screen. Um, you know, kind
of like, why do I need to go to China?
I can walk to watch a documentary about it? Well,
except you can go to China, right and um but no,
but no, that's a that's a good counter argument as well.
It's like and it gets back to some people to
make that argument when you say why I haven't like

(36:53):
for some Americans, I like, I I've certainly met people
before who go why do you travel so much? I'm like, oh,
you know, you get to see new sites and learn
about new people, and it expands your ideas about the world.
And they're like, hey, I can get all that stuff
watching the travel channel. Yeah, but you can't catch a
weird flu watching and that's part of my travel experience.
But I don't come back with some sort of weird bug.

(37:14):
Then I know I didn't actually explore so A really grounded,
sort of very like logical look at the economic argument
was conducted actually in by the US Congressional Budget Office, UH,
and they performed what they say is a nonpartisan analysis

(37:35):
for Congress to review the economic benefits of what we
would get out of eliminating the space program, and this
would be from the years. The proposal is specifically to
terminate human space exploration. So it's important to say that because,
like as Robert was just saying, we can send up
unmanned probes and stuff like that right Like we're using

(37:56):
radio waves right now to map Jupiter in particular, so
we can see sort of what the geography of the
planet is like underneath all those spots. Yeah, I mean
that's the other I mean, even getting me on probes
and robots, I mean just pure sensors, pure telescope technology,
Like the human eye is not gonna is not going
to be able to glimpse these things. We need the

(38:18):
We need the eye of technology to glimpse and understand
these things. That's the that's the lens. That's important. So
the Congressional Budget Office says, look, this proposal would allow
NASA to continue its aeronautics and its robotics missions. That
you know, we're not cutting that out, just the human stuff. Now.
They found by crunching the numbers that this would save

(38:39):
seventy three billion dollars in that time span from three
They argue that because most space missions use electronics and
information technology, that there's no need to send humans into
space because the instruments don't need the people there to
operate them. And by using quote robots, I think robots

(39:00):
is a bit of a strong term here, but that
won't put human life in danger either, right Uh. And
it would actually decrease the cost. Because we make the
missions one way, we don't have to figure out a
way to bring them back and bring them back safely,
and that's a huge cost. Yeah, a one way mission
to Mars, uh isn't nearly as scarier thing when it's

(39:20):
just a robot. Robot Matt Damon. So yeah, robot Matt.
He's going to science the beep out of this. I
mean that's actually a pretty you know, when you think
about that movie, which was great, like most, I mean,
the whole thing that all the problems depend on the
fact that you sent a human there, and then there's

(39:42):
all of this you know, symbolic power and sending him
there and all this additional cost and keeping him alive
there and then and getting him back. Whereas it's just
a robot, you just write it off like any other robot.
We've sent out into his face. Yeah. Yeah, which some
people argue that's a problem too, especially lay along the
sort of pollution slash anti capitalist lines. But anyways, to

(40:05):
finish it off the this congressional article, they specifically added, look,
there's also arguments against this too, and here's what they are.
That eliminating human space flight would end the progress that's
necessary to send humans to Mars, leading right into that
Martian uh analogy. And also that there is possibly a

(40:25):
scientific advantage to having human beings on the I S
S to conduct experiments in micro gravity. That's true, that's
a good one. We kind of it's easy to forget
I S S and and all the work that goes
on there when we start thinking about these more futuristic
visions of sending humans to other planets. Now. On the
other hand, in two thousand eight, Freakonomics hosted a basically

(40:49):
like a round table of a bunch of space exploration
experts with the theme is space exploration worth the cost?
And I'm not going to break it down by like
each one. You can go look at it yourself. It's
pretty interesting, but they pretty much came down totally in
favor of space exploration and there are reasons where that
space exploration stimulates children to enter into stem fields. The

(41:12):
returns on investments generate royalties from patents and licenses. But
what's interesting is that all that money goes back into
the US Treasury instead of into NASA. So some of
them were arguing, Hey, you know, if you made it
so that the money that's generated from the technology that's
invented by NASA goes back into NASA, NASA will be
self funding. Then uh. And also this was a weird argument.

(41:36):
I thought. Uh. One guy said, well, we spend a
hundred and fifty four billion dollars a year in the
United States on alcohol, so why shouldn't we spend that
kind of money on going into space? See, and this
is this is where we get into an argument. We
see with science a lot that sounds to me like
the kind of thing that I would see in Facebook comments.
And then people will say, oh, but where is this

(41:56):
lost flight? How come we can do this? We can't
find that? Uh, you know the whole Really, we can
put a man on the moon. Why can't we achieve
this thing in our culture, in our life, either scientifically
or or or non science? Whatever is like a specific
current event type crisis. Curing cancer, it's another big one.

(42:17):
How Come how the argument is always like, oh, why
why aren't they curing cancer? I think, well, they can't
cure cancers. They're stopping wildfires. This is fluid dynamics. Yes,
this is a different realm. And just because just because
cancer research is hugely important and lives are are on
the line, it doesn't mean that these other areas of
scientific inquiry or not important, right right. Uh, they made

(42:41):
many more arguments in favor of space. So I'm gonna
throw some of these down here and then we'll keep
those in mind as we continue on with the arguments
against going into space. Uh. One is that it would,
of course allow us to establish human civilization on another world.
We talked already about the new technologies, but in particular
they gave us some examples saying we've developed a better

(43:03):
understanding of osteoporosis and balance disorder as a result of
sending people into outer space, and we've built new medical
devices such as digital mammography that generate wealth. Now now again,
like it's debatable is that going to the treasury, is
it going to NASA, or is it going into private hands? Also,
miniaturization of electronics devices for space flight led to our

(43:26):
present day computers and phones. So these are some tangible
examples of that kind of trickled down and technology that
we were discussing earlier. The other argument economically that I
thought was interesting was they said NASA's development in the South,
meaning the South of the United States, by establishing centers
or space flight operations, uh, that those brought economic economic

(43:52):
development into areas that previously didn't have them, basically providing jobs,
specifically thinking of Cape canaveral and Garda and Huntsville, Alabama.
It's also the reason you have like five or six
German restaurants in Huntsville, Alabama. It's like the mecca of
German restaurants in the entire region. All except for what's
the what's the fake German town here in Georgia Helen? Helen?

(44:14):
I think Helen only that is Helen is not a
destination for Yeah, if you if you're from the South,
have you ever been to Helen, Georgia, You know what
we're talking about. But it's like this little like touristy,
fake German village. It's kind of bizarre. Yeah, they do
have a good Thai restaurant data. By the way, in
the fake German town, there's a great rest there, just

(44:35):
f y I to local listeners. Other other reasons why
we where we should go is this is an interesting terminology.
It allows us to address global challenges with quote space solutions,
and one of those is the international context. So it
offers a venue for peaceful cooperation between nations. Uh. And

(44:58):
that results in a foreign policy boost and prestige to
those nations, right. Uh. And so the person who made
this argument says that it justifies the Cold War basically,
which again, like like I said at the top, some
of these arguments I find a little bit loose like that.
That one's kind of strange to me. You end up

(45:19):
kind of taking uh, it's you end up taking approaches
if you're playing a game of civilization right where you're
you're thinking, oh, well, this brought up my technology technology score,
but then also it lowered the risk level. And it's
just it gets it's helpful to take these these broad views,
but it's also it also creates its own problems with perspective. Yeah,

(45:40):
I think so as well. Another one is some again
sort of loose, right, but uh, well, you know, of
course we should keep doing this and spending these billions
of dollars because it will answer the are we alone? Question?
Which sure it will, and that that would be fascinating,
you know, that would be great headlines. Right. But do
we need to know are we alone? More than we

(46:00):
need to I don't know, feed the hungry? Yeah, stuff
like that is sort of where the economic argument gets tricky.
It's also one of those things. Um. Not to be
too much of a downer, but sometimes I think about
that and I think, well, it would be great to know,
but the answer can only mess us up, you know,
like the answers no, then oh I feel so alone.

(46:21):
If the answer is yes, well then it's whoa, what
does that mean for my sense of identity? What does
that mean for my faith? And then are they scary
or not? Should I now just be petrified of the
the Independence day version? Um? And then there's this, you know,
continual argument that we keep coming back to that ex
exploration is intrinsic to human nature, so of course we

(46:43):
have to fulfill our human nature right um. And whenever
I hear that, I can't help but think of the
Franklin Expedition into uh the Arctic because I did a
lot of research into that for another project, and that
was basically, you know, this pre space age that that
was their outer space, like being able to traverse the

(47:03):
Northwest passage. Uh. And they lost tons alive and spent
many a lot of money. They still don't know what happened. Well,
they sort of know what happened to the Franklin expedition.
But you know, there's there's many a horror story written
about the cannibalization that possibly went on on the icy
wastes of the North uh, purely so that we could
fulfill this need of human exploration. So there's that. Uh. Now,

(47:29):
one guy in particular, he says, quote asking if space
exploration with humans or robots are both is worth the
effort is like questioning the value of Columbus's voyage to
the New World in the fourteen nineties. Now, it's interesting
about that is one of the people that we're going
to talk about next actually makes that argument and says, yeah,

(47:52):
that was a bad thing too. Yeah, there are a
lot of compelling arguments that that was. That was a
bad thing. And it's kind of weird to say you
can't doubt this because doubting that is like second guessing
something that happened in the past. I can't really, I
can't change what happened with Columbus. You know, a lot
of aspects of that scenario sucked. But um, you know

(48:12):
I am in that flow of time. I'm not going
to go back and kill him. Yeah. I gotta say,
like a lot of these people in this Freakonomics roundtable,
you know, it was a couple of years ago now,
so maybe their their arguments would be different. But I
admire their enthusiasm for space travel, but some of their
arguments weren't very well thought out. And I think part

(48:34):
of it comes from, again just going from the broad
view to the smaller view and it ultimately being kind
of its own wicked problem. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Now, another
thing I want to point out here before we take
another break is that, you know, looking back, it's easy
to look back at the footage of of of the
the original space race and thinking, well, everybody was behind it.

(48:56):
There's just so much like political and public will that
was devoted for it. Of course, you were able to
pull off such a megaproject, and of course, to a
certain extent that's true. We were we were able to
do that kind of things that those pep we were
able to pull off landing humans on the Moon because
that political capital was there. However, Uh, I've found a

(49:20):
couple of sources that really drive home the fact that
public opinion polls conducted during the Apollo missions, um the
voices of critics that we can look back on, it
shows that not everyone was really as on board as
we sometimes like to think. Yeah, like I'm imagining like
the Archie Bunkers of the world probably didn't like get

(49:40):
as excited about the mission to the Moon as like
maybe the rest of us. Yeah. And in fact, if
some of this comes from space historian Roger Lanaias of
the National Inner Space Museum, who we mentioned earlier in
that piece about Dr James C. Fletcher, Yeah, he said, quote.
Polls do not support a contention that American embraced the

(50:00):
lunar landing mission. Consistently through the nineteen sixties, the majority
of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost.
With the one exception to this poll to this a
poll taken at the time of Apollo eleven lunar landing
in July ninety nine, and uh, consistently throughout the decade,
forty five to sixty percent of Americans belief that the
government was spending too much money on space, indicative of

(50:24):
a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. Yeah, so
that's sort of like our revisionist history, right, especially through
pop culture, like like, yeah, now we've got movies with
Tom Hanks where we sit around and celebrate how amazing
our ingenuity was for sending Apollo up there. But at
the time, Yeah, yeah, indeed, and uh has pointed out

(50:47):
in an excellent Atlantic article by Alexa c Magical. Could
that I recommend anyone check out. I'll include a link
to it on the landing page. For this episode, I
was titled the Moondoggle, The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program.
Um He says, there was a fair amount of civil
rights criticism of the space program. So you had, for instance,
in the in the musical scene, you had the the

(51:09):
late great Gil Scott Heron who died in two thousand eleven.
You may know him for the Revolution will not be
telefol televised. Home is Where the Hatred Is. A number
of songs are this highly talented artists. Uh. He wrote
a couple of songs that were critical of the program,
most notably nineteen seventies Whitey on the Moon um, which
is probably the most notable example. But the it kind

(51:32):
of goes like this. I'm not gonna sing it, but
I'm just gonna quote it. He says, with all that
money I made last year for Whitey on the Moon,
how come there ain't no money here? White He's on
the moon. You know, I just about had my fill
of Whitey on the Moon. I think I'll I'll send
these dollar these doctor bills airmail special to Whitey on
the Moon. And of course what he's saying here is

(51:52):
that we're spending all of this money on well, on
sending white people to the moon on this space program.
That is not benefiting people who are suffering. It's not
and it's not benefiting UH, individuals who are still fighting
for their own civil rights, while all of this money
is is fighting to do really with with hardly tangible benefits,

(52:14):
certainly not to the common man. Ray Bradberry has a story,
I can't remember the title of it, that's in The
Illustrated Man that's along the lines of this too, Yeah,
where the premises that African Americans have basically moved to
Mars because civil rights issues on Earth were so horrific,
and then white people on Earth had mind all the

(52:38):
resources and we're starving and they needed help. So they Uh,
it's about like a rocket man coming to Mars. He
lands on Mars, and some of the people on Mars
are like, why should we accept these people? Why should
we help them? Ultimately, the community comes together and says,
of course we're gonna We're gonna take care of So
essentially Bradberry wrote an afro futurist pete. That's interesting. Yeah,

(53:01):
it's an incredible story. Off to go, I'll go look
that up because I I found I find afro futurism
a very interesting area. Yeah, you have this convergence of
of enthusiasm for space and science fiction but also the
civil rights movement. Yeah, there was stuff like that even
in like the old EAC comics in the late fifties.
In fact, like one of the reasons this is an

(53:22):
interesting little side note, one of the reasons why horror
comics were banned in the fifties and why the Comics
Code was created was because EAC comics had a story
that was a sci fi story where at the end
of the story, the an astronaut takes off his helmet
and it's a black man and it's you know, the

(53:43):
people writing it were meant to be a civil rights
promotional story, but the black man was sweating. There was
a bead of sweat dripping down his face in the panel.
And the people who were against the story at the
times said that that was like too primal or something
like that, and that you know that the comic book

(54:05):
was pushing boundaries too far by showing the sensuality of
the humanity of this astronaut. Huh, yeah, that is fascinating.
So hey, Gil Scott Heron wasn't alone. Yeah, indeed, um,
and certainly they were. Yeah, it went beyond just just
you know, the work of your artists. Um. In Black
protesters marched on Cape Canaveral to protest the launch of

(54:27):
a Paula fourteen. Uh. Then civil rights leader Jose Williams, who,
of course we have Jose Williams here in Atlanta. Yeah,
he framed this as a protest against quote, our nation's
inability to choose humane priorities, which gets down to the
economic argument again, right, Like it's just truly a priority
and what's more important to us. Yeah, clearly, if you

(54:49):
look at the way that the budget breaks down, the
war is tremendously more. Yeah, and that is war. Robert
defense that's often used as an argument for space exploration is, Look,
if you spent just a fraction more of what you
spend on the war in the Middle East on space exploration,
then we would we'd experience all of these tangible benefits

(55:11):
as as opposed to just the merre tangible benefits of
military research. Yeah. I think about the Star Wars and
I'm not talking about the movie, the Star Wars program
research done in the eighties. That's combining both worlds. It's
the space exploration world combined with militarization, which we talked
about with the Weapons in Space episode. Yeah. Now that
that Alexacy Madrigal article that mentioned he he spends a

(55:33):
lot of time talking about the work of his Israeli
American sociologist uh Amatali at Ziani uh and his fifty
four book The Moondoggle, Domestic and International Implications of the
Space Race, And in this book at the only laid
out scientific opposition to the space race as a cash
and crash approach to science, and he argued that, based

(55:56):
on the opinions of various scientists that he spoke to,
space should only be pursued in balance with other scientific
and technological pursuits, and shouldn't be pursued in a manner
that weakens other scientific endeavors. One of the facts that
cited here um in the book, and then cited by
Magical is that of every three dollars spent on research
and development in the United United States in nineteen three,

(56:18):
one went for defense, one for space, and the remaining
one for all other research purposes, including private industry and
medical research. He also argued that the space program at
the time function as something of a brain range. He
had the best in the brightest and where they drawn,
they're drawn where the energy is, they're drawn where the
money is. And that was the exactly Yeah and um.

(56:43):
And it's also argued that while one of the Space
program did create jobs, it did stimulate the economy, it
mainly did so with a focus on highly skilled positions.
Yeah sure, right, Yeah, they're not. There's not that many
jobs for janitors at NASA necessarily as there are for
engineers with PhDs. So how are we going to abolish

(57:04):
outer Space. Okay, So Sam Chris, I was unfamiliar with him,
I learned. Actually, it turned out I was familiar with him.
I had read articles by him before, but I didn't
realize who he was. Uh. He just in February of
this year wrote a piece at the New Inquiry that
I've already said as the manifesto of the Committee to
Abolish outer Space. I learned about it from uh my

(57:26):
patron saint for Stuff to Blow your Mind, warren Ellis's newsletter.
He included it in his newsletter, um Warren Ellis being
a political science fiction writer, mainly of comics but also
of pros. Uh. So, Chris, from what I can gather,
seems to be a writer who alternates between I guess
what I would call florid prose satire and nonfiction essays.

(57:51):
And his big thing seems to be challenging what we
assumed to be authority figures in modern thought, like Neil
de Grass, Tyson Slaboy, Jack, Richard Dawkins, Nate Silver, people
like that. Uh He's written for Wired, Slate, invice. This
isn't just some like crazy guy off on his own blog,
although he does have his own blog and trying to read,
it is fairly impenetrable. Um. And I also recommend take

(58:15):
a look at this guy's Twitter feed two because it's
it's also like pretty out there. Um. But this piece,
in particular, he argues that the promise of the beautiful
journey to space is actually a political lie. It's an
ant and so he's making an anti capitalist argument. Uh.
And he says that this political lie is perpetuated by

(58:36):
science communicators who pretend to love science. And what I
wonder is if we would be included in there now
he does include some of our peers in there. Uh.
In a separate piece, he expands on it in a
Wired article against Neil de grass Tyson and I f
L Science. He accuses them of quote making the universe boring,

(58:58):
telling people things that they already know, and dispelling misconceptions
that nobody actually holds. So I'd like to think that
we were not guilty of those things. But hey, listeners,
let us know. Yeah, I feel like this is an
area we could we could really discuss at length another time.
But there is this whole push and pull between science

(59:21):
and public science science and you could I guess I've
heard it called vulgar science. Uh, and we've talked. We
talked about it in the Cargo Cults episode and sort
of in the Wicked Problems episode two, that there is
a somewhat like deification of quote unquote science in today's
pop culture news cycle, and space is kind of a
shining gym. It is, you don't quite, It's like, it's

(59:44):
essentially haven't it's essentially the afterlife for the vulgar science y. Yeah.
Another quote he has here is he says science here
meaning in these situations of writing, has very little to
do with the scientific method itself. It means ontological physicalism,

(01:00:05):
not believing in quote our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the
spectral lee, stupid and more than anything, pretty pictures of
nebula and tree frogs. So, okay, I sort of get
where he's coming from here. But you know, I'm often
accused of being a curmudge, and this guy really seems
to be planting a flag there. He's been a bit

(01:00:26):
of a hardcore. Yeah, But his manifesto, he says, look,
space itself in the existence of life is actually vanishingly short,
and we are all headed toward death because the universe
is already unmaking itself. But in the meantime, here we
are polluting space with all of our electronic debris and
probes and what we refer to as space junk, right uh.

(01:00:48):
And he says, if our exploration of space goes like
our exploration of Earth has, then Mars will end up
exploiting We'll just end up exploiting Mars for resources, right uh.
And there's a there's an infamous book by Robert Zubrin,
the Case for Mars, that is often cited as being like, yeah,
this is this is the go to book of like

(01:01:09):
why we should, why we should get up there? Why
zuber is a great advocate four Mars. Yeah, I interviewed
him several years back. Yeah, and it's he is. Yeah,
he's gung ho. He's like, he's very much of the
mindset not only should we go to Mars, we should
be there today. He makes an impassioned argument, Well, Sam,
Chris hates that guy. Uh. He says that this brings

(01:01:32):
us back to what we mentioned earlier. He says that
Zubrin's case for Mars is basically an analog for Columbus
pillaging the America's uh, and that you know, going to
Mars will lead to quote the spread of a rationalism,
the banalization of popular culture, the loss of willingness by
individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves and to

(01:01:53):
think for themselves. So, okay, I don't know if I
agree with it. Yeah, I don't know if I do either.
I also think, like um, like many kind of quasi
Marxist critics, this argument ends up getting lost a lot,
and it's sort of flowery poetic prose and trying to
show how great of a writer this guy actually is,

(01:02:14):
rather than focusing on his argumentation. Uh, like this segment
here where I'm telling you about what is in this
It took me, like I would say, a good hour
to pull this out of the morass of his language.
But also I would imagine he would say, well, this's
this is postmodern argumentation, man like, it's a manifest doing
the same way to the cyborg manifest. Totally. Donna Harroway

(01:02:36):
is exactly in the same camp. Yeah yeah, so uh
he says the journey to any frontier is going to
result in the depths of millions. But we convince ourselves
that Mars is okay, right, because Mars is lifeless. Nobody
can die on Mars. Right. Uh, And he brings us
back around again to the Columbus thing, and he says, well,

(01:02:59):
feudalism is dying in Europe. The conquering of the America's
kept the ruling class in power by shipping vast quantities
of precious metals back to them. So this is basically
an anti capitalist argument against going into space because Earth
is running out of both physical space for human beings
and the minerals of value for us to exploit. He

(01:03:21):
even goes so far as to say that if we
end up going to Mars, it could lead to slavery again. Yeah,
so he comes down hard on this. Now there's a
similar argument, but I would say less strident argument made
by Paul Dickens in a article that he wrote for

(01:03:44):
Monthly Review, which is an independent socialist magazine. And Dickens
basically says, look, the humanization of the cosmos is primarily
about benefiting the powerful, namely economic and military institutions, and
it will keep happening as we continue to colonize the cosmos.
So he says, we need to come up with some

(01:04:04):
kind of alternative forms of this. So he's not like
necessarily against going into space. What he's against is doing
it for the gain of the upper class essentially. Uh,
And he says, yeah, we look at going into outer
space as being a symbol of modernization. It's progress. It
brings social unity, right. Like he actually points out he

(01:04:25):
says one of the most lauded benefits of space exploration
is teleworking. That we wouldn't have teleworking technology. Uh. If
it wasn't for the space race, well then I guess
it was all worth it. But I don't know, man,
tell we both telework, but man alive is it seems
like we haven't gotten that technology nailed down yet. The technology. Um, yeah,

(01:04:48):
and to say nothing of the weirdness of trying to
work from home around at all the rights. So then
he also mentions, hey, look at this big boom in
space tourism. Now keep in mind this is in two thousand, hen,
this is six years ago. So he's already talking about
Richard Branson getting a you know, trying to create like
the space tourism industry, charging people exorbitant prices so that

(01:05:09):
can fly lower, be at lower orbit. Uh. He also
mentioned something that I had never heard of before, called
the Space Renaissance Initiative, which is apparently an international group
of over seventy private organizations that promote space exploration, and
they have their own manifesto, and this manifesto is to
help the economy because there's too many people on Earth

(01:05:30):
that are making too many demands on Earth's resources. So
they sort of see themselves the same way as like
the wealthy philanthropists who funded exploration to the New World, right,
the people who helped Columbus out. Okay, they're not saying
there are too many people, let's throw some people into
outer space. Yeah yeah, not not that far, not yet.
We're not gonna put him out the airlock. Uh. But

(01:05:52):
he says, look, that's a weird argument, right, because instead
of finding a solution to our problems, you're just basically
jettising them away, right, We'll just push push them off.
So another argument by philanthropists like this is something like
will find cheap supplies for labor or raw materials up there, right,
So that's going to benefit the economy as well. His

(01:06:13):
evidence that he showed in for the quote global space
economy was that it had increased between two thousand four
and two thousand nine. Uh. Now you hear people often
to crying like that. NASA is not getting enough funding.
But he's talking about everything from commercial satellites to military hardware,
space tourism, and launch services, and that government budgets actually

(01:06:36):
rose in two thousand nine up to two hundred and
sixty one billion dollars to promote space exploration. And at
the end he mentions the growth of SpaceX under Elon Musk,
which we kind of talked about at the beginning, right
as that's that's currently are are kind of like quote
perfect plan for going to space, as we're enamored with

(01:06:58):
launching and landing these rockets that SpaceX is working on.
So all of this raises a question that I would
I would pitch to you the audience, who owns outer space?
And what about the collisions between all that stuff that
we have an outer space? Who's responsible for that? With
all the space junk that's floating around up there, Like
there's a lot of like who who takes responsibility when

(01:07:21):
those crash into each other? He even argues, you know,
what could we do with the money there that we're
spending up in space here on Earth? Could we end
poverty with all of those billions of dollars that we're
spending on going to space, I might got answers No, Yeah,

(01:07:41):
I I would say no as well. I imagine that
it's a much more pervasive, wicked problem than Yeah. There
is a tendency to sort of, when you're talking about
these vast sums of money, to sort of throw them
down hallways and say, how throw this money down the
hallway of poverty. You got it, you got it. That's alve,
throw this money down the hallway of of overpopulation. You've

(01:08:01):
got it solved. And it just it never works out
that way, alright. So there you have it. A lot
of the anti space arguments, some arguments for that we've
mentioned in place, everything in balance, but for the most part,
focusing on uh, on the voices that are saying this
is maybe not worth the amount of money we're spending.

(01:08:21):
Maybe the benefits here aren't really worth chasing after, certainly
with not not with this level of money. Um, but
you know, economic arguments, religious arguments, political arguments. So there's
something to it there. I just don't know where I
fall anymore, Robert, I don't know. I mean, I want
us to go to space. I love I love those

(01:08:42):
ideas as like as as everybody does, right, Like like
I said, like I was a little kid sitting there
watching Krista mcculliff go up, and I was supposed to
be proud of one of my uh uh local New
Hampshire right's flying into space uh and have this tragic ending.
But um, I don't know. I mean, when you present
all these other arguments of what we could do with

(01:09:03):
that money, who it's benefiting, I don't know where I
fall anymore. Yeah, I find the arguments, the arguments about
ways we could use the money to better benefit people
here on Earth and better address sustainability problems here. I
find those to be pretty compelling at the same time.
And this may this may actually spill more into almost

(01:09:25):
a kind of religious or you know, just just fear
based decision making process. But there are plenty of times
where I'll be I'll be outside, like playing with my son,
and I'll this happens way too often. I'll look up
in the sky and I'll imagine, uh, something burning through
it coming down, And it's kind of like a scenario

(01:09:46):
where a family waits to the last minute to pack
and move out of the apartment that they're having to
make kate and it's like, why didn't you pack up
ahead of time. Why didn't you prepare? You knew this
was coming, and you didn't prepare, And now it's coming down.
So I keep coming back to our planet's ability to

(01:10:06):
to shield itself from near Earth objects, to shield our
culture and our people in our species from a mass extinction,
And I just I always come back to that and
think that that is worth the effort, Like that should
be a major line item on on every UH, on
every politician's desk. But so so maybe maybe here's the compromise.

(01:10:29):
We we put all that money rather into space exploration.
We're gonna build uh like a giant force field that
envelops the entire planet Earth. Sure, if we can figure
out of plant. Um, but that's the thing. How are
you gonna you're gonna? I mean, I'm being phasical, no, no no,
But but I like the play does come back to
the idea that even even my view here, my sort

(01:10:52):
of go to argument for space exploration is still more
about Earth. It's still more about safeguarding what we have
here rather than and exploring all of these you know,
fascinating things about say the Jovian moons, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
There's a lot of good arguments on both sides. And
you know what, listeners, we would love to hear from you.
I imagine at this point there's a lot of you

(01:11:14):
out there that are probably already halfway through writing as
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(01:11:37):
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