Earlier this week, Vice President Nominee JD Vance announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he wants the United States to “conquer the stars.” It’s a reference to his support of Elon Musk, who, at a Trump rally a few week ago, declared that he wants to “make science fiction real.” The rhetoric is part of Musk’s effort to establish a human population on Mars and make humanity “sustainably multiplanetary.” But Musk’s dream is my nightmare, and despite what JD Vance says, it shouldn’t “inspire all of us.”
For context, JD Vance and Musk aren’t alone in such an aspiration. Jeff Bezos, who has his own space exploration company, Blue Origin, remarked last year that he’d “love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system.” Richard Branson, who founded space tourism company Virgin Galactic, once noted that he too is “determined to being a part of starting a population on Mars.”
Forget luxury real estate and financial tech — space, and specifically the expansion of human civilization beyond Earth, has become the latest obsession of the ultra-wealthy.
The problem is that expanding our deeply flawed society would merely amplify our mistakes, failures and acts of cruelty on a much larger scale. We are not anywhere near morally advanced enough to begin colonizing the universe. We must stop this effort before it’s too late and the suffering we inflict grows further.
As you might imagine, that’s not how those in the billionaire club see it. Musk, for example, argues we should ensure the preservation of “the light of consciousness,” and that we must colonize Mars “before something happens on Earth to prevent that.” By this he means existential threats, “for example nuclear war, a supervirus or population collapse that weakens civilization to the point where it loses the ability to send supply ships to Mars.”
We are not anywhere near morally advanced enough to begin colonizing the universe.
Bezos, who has his eye on the Moon to start, ultimately imagines something of a utopia: “If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," he said. "The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small."
And then there are those that argue that we have a moral obligation to make the human population as large as possible. To not do so would be, as one philosopher put it, an “astronomical waste.”
But this wouldn’t make sense if many of those lives were bad, much like the current state of Earth. Consider that in 2023, more than 2 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity. Among those, nearly one billion people went without food for an entire day or more at times. This year, we saw new wars begin in places like Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine — part of a trend as war has been on the rise for more than the last decade. I could go on and on.
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The suffering on Earth dramatically increases when we consider how humans treat animals. We cage billions of hens, giving them less space than a sheet of paper for their eggs on factory farms. We conduct sadistic experiments on more than a hundred million animals each year. And we scoop trillions of fish out of the water indiscriminately in large nets who are left to die slowly by asphyxiation.
This is not a good résumé, to say the least. It would be a grave mistake to replicate these conditions on other planets. There’s little to indicate that these injustices will cease, or that new ones won’t arise. We haven’t earned the right to expand the human species beyond our planetary borders. Unless we put an end to these abuses, more humans may only lead to more suffering — for ourselves and for others.
We haven’t earned the right to expand the human species beyond our planetary borders.
Some proponents of space colonization point out that exploring space has historically led to big technological advancements for those of us on Earth, so we should expand such efforts, not reduce them. But that’s the wrong way to think about it; space colonization actually diverts critical attention and resources from pressing Earth-bound issues. As much as I celebrate memory foam and scratch-resistant lenses, the trillions of dollars spent on space exploration could have been better used to address more urgent problems on Earth, such as poverty, healthcare, education and climate change.
These challenges should take precedence over expansion into space. In questioning the rationale behind plans to colonize other planets, former President Barack Obam put it this way earlier this year: "I would rather us invest in taking care of this planet here.” I would too.
And given that we are already in the process of destroying one planet, it makes little sense to bring our exploitive ways elsewhere. Consider that we have more than enough resources on Earth. The issue is with how humans use them i.e. unsustainably. If we extract resources from other planets without fixing humanity, we will simply squander those resources too.
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One might argue that humans are nowhere even close to reaching other planets, let alone settling on them, and thus that this isn’t an issue we even need to be thinking about. But just because something might not happen, or even is unlikely to happen, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take steps to prevent it, especially if the potential for harm is large. We wear seat belts regularly, even though the odds of getting into a car crash are low — 1 in 366 per every 1,000 miles. Scientists monitor meteors just in case one begins to head toward us, as improbable as this is. Nuclear war isn’t anywhere near imminent, but I’m glad Los Angeles is preparing for the possibility. Nobody knows if these events will take place, but surely it makes sense to take steps to reduce our chances of very bad outcomes.
Ultimately, it’s better to contain humanity to Earth until we are more ethical and responsible. If humanity stops being short-sighted and cruel, and there is evidence good human character will persist through time, I will change my tune.
But until such a time, we need to reckon with the delusion that space colonization is a good idea. It isn’t. We must stop these politicians and billionaires from making the human species a multiplanetary one, before it’s too late. The fate of trillions of individuals depends on it.
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