I’ve stated before that I love Star Trek. I also love sci-fi like For All Mankind, which is probably my favorite show on television at the moment. I also love the Earthrise photo. I love the phenomenal new images sent back from our Artemis astronauts. The notion that we’re not alone in the universe is a powerful one when it unifies us here at home to do something together.
But I’m not sure the current “space race” is doing that. So consider this episode my love letter to Spaceship Earth and my honest reckoning with why we keep trying to leave it.
Today, we’re going to talk about space. Why parts of space exploration are genuinely wonderful. Why parts of it are being catastrophically misused. And why the sequencing of our current space race might be one of the most expensive mistakes we’re making as a species right now.
Before I seriously piss off my space loving nerd friends, if I haven’t already, I want to talk about some genuinely amazing things about space exploration, because there are a few things about space that don’t suck at all. In fact, there are some things that are mind-blowingly awesome.
First, I’m not really arguing against NASA. NASA has given us weather satellites and GPS and water purification technology and some badass telescopes that make astrophysicists cry at their desks. It’s magnificent. I want more of it.
Second, I’m not really arguing against satellite infrastructure. Starlink, whatever you think of its founder, is providing internet access to genuinely underserved communities around the world. Satellites are monitoring our climate, tracking deforestation, coordinating disaster response. That is space serving Earth. Thumbs up.
Third, I’m not arguing against space defense. The “Don’t Look Up” scenario, an asteroid on collision course with Earth, that’s a real category of existential risk. Having eyes in the sky and the capability to do something about it? Legitimate. Important.
Fourth, I am absolutely not arguing against the scientists, engineers, and astronauts who made Artemis happen. Those people are freaking extraordinary. And the fact that their achievement got approximately two minutes of attention before being buried under the latest political catastrophe is frankly a damn shame.
Here’s my actual argument. And I want you to hold it in your head for the rest of this episode. Space for Earth? Beautiful.
Space instead of Earth? That is when space gets stupid.
This episode was inspired by a recent episode of Nate Hagen’s podcast, The Great Simplification, called The Fantasy of Space Colonization, where a physicist and an environmental scientist spend two hours systematically dismantling the biophysical case for space colonization. It’s one of the most clarifying things I’ve listened to in a long time. I’ll be referencing parts of it through this episode, but you should go listen to the whole thing. Seriously.
That episode inspired me to push on something they didn’t quite name though. And that’s the question of sequencing. Not whether we can go to space, but whether we should be trying to do that right now, given, you know, everything else.
Here’s the first part of the problem. Right now, somewhere on Earth, there is an engineer with a physics PhD and 20 years of experience in fluid dynamics and complex material science. She’s brilliant. She could be designing next generation carbon capture systems. She could be engineering drought resistant food systems for Africa. She could be building resilient energy grids for the world’s most grid impaired places, you know, like Texas. Instead, she’s optimizing fuel efficiency for a rocket that’ll carry six ultra wealthy tourists to the edge of space for 11 minutes.
This is what I call “genius misallocation.” And it’s not just a money problem. It’s a human energy problem. We are aiming our smartest people at the wrong freaking frontier! The people capable of solving Earth’s most pressing problems are being recruited at enormous salaries to work on problems that, as I’ll share with you next, might not even be solvable at all.
The opportunity cost for this isn’t abstract. Every moment we spend pointing our best engineering talent at frickin’ Mars is another moment we’re not pointing it at the problems that will determine whether our civilization makes it to the next century. That’s problem number one.
Let’s say you’re not moved by that philosophical argument. Here’s the second part of the problem. I suspect most of us have seen enough movies to know that living in the vacuum of space is, you know, kinda hard. But let’s say you’re a “Yeah, but we’ll just science the sh*t out of it!” person. I kinda get that. It’s an intoxicating worldview. I mean, Matt Damon planted potatoes on Mars and worked out great. How hard can it be? Turns out pretty hard. Like biophysically, this- is- not- happening hard.
Why? Because nothing complex lives in space. Not you, not me, not anything with more than one cell, really. Maybe tardigrades, but that’s about it. The physics of space are brutal. The radiation alone during a Mars transit would essentially guarantee premature cancer death. If you make it to the surface, Mars then takes its turn. Bone loss, eye degeneration, a 95 % CO2 atmosphere, and soil laced with toxic chemicals that would kill your crops before the radiation finishes killing you. Please, don’t eat the Martian potatoes. Space is not a place we can love, not like Earth. It’s a place that would prefer to kill us.
But here’s an even better argument for why this problem might be currently unsolvable. We already tried it and we failed miserably. In the early 1990s, a group of brilliant scientists sealed eight people inside a $200 million three acre facility in the Arizona desert Maybe you’ve heard of this. It was called Biosphere 2. They had recreated seven distinct earth biomes… rainforest, ocean, savanna, desert, so on. with 3000 species of plants and animals. Biodiversity, room temperature, earth gravity, a support team outside the door. Their mission: demonstrate that humans could survive in a genuinely closed ecological system. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t.
Within 16 months, oxygen levels dropped to the equivalent of living at 15,000 feet altitude. Most vertebrate species went extinct. All the pollinators died, which meant the plants couldn’t reproduce. Cockroaches and ants took over. The crew started smuggling in supplies. They had to pump in outside oxygen twice just to keep the people alive. This was, let me remind you, on Earth, in Arizona, with unlimited resources and the best scientists available.
And since then, we have never, not once, not anywhere, successfully maintained a closed ecological system capable of supporting human life for any meaningful length of time. We can’t even really do it for a cockroach. And now we want to do it on a planet 140 million miles away with a toxic atmosphere and partial gravity? Come on!
Now if you’re thinking: the International Space Station, what about that? That’s not a counter argument for this either. The ISS costs roughly a million dollars a day to operate and requires constant resupply missions from Earth. It’s not “living in space,” it’s camping with a very expensive extension cord. Tom Murphy’s phrase from Higgins podcast about this is perfect. He says it’s basically a straw sucking earth resources at an alarming rate.
So “We’ll just science the sh*t out of it” is not a plan, my friends. It’s a lame hand wavy mentalist trick designed to get you to look the other way. Look anywhere, I guess… long as you don’t look up.
Alright, if you’re still not convinced, Here’s the third part of the problem: we’re getting the order of these things wrong. I believe we could go to space someday. I hope we do. I want humanity to be a multi-planetary, multi-stellar civilization. If there are other species out there we could learn from and get to know and hopefully NOT do Klingon battle with, I am seriously on board for that. I want a Star Trek future so badly it’s kind of embarrassing.
But we’re missing something vitally important about Star Trek: Earth is beloved in that universe. Star Trek is, of course, about being out amongst the stars. But there’s a reason why this show is set multiple centuries into the future. Why? Because nobody in Star Trek went to space to ESCAPE Earth. In the Star Trek universe, Earth in the 23rd century is basically a kind of frickin’ paradise. It’s a post-scarcity, post-money, treasured home base that people return to with reverence and love.
The Federation didn’t launch the Enterprise because Earth was failing and they needed to get away. They launched it AFTER a massive global crisis, AFTER fundamentally transforming society over a century of hard work, AFTER solving energy scarcity, AFTER reorienting collective human desires toward exploration and cooperation instead of extraction and domination.
Space in Star Trek is the NEXT chapter. It’s not a coping mechanism. It’s not an escape hatch. It’s not a lifeboat for the people who broke the current damn ship.
Any good entrepreneur, any good creator or builder understands the importance of sequencing. They know that sequencing might not be everything, but… almost! Getting the order of operations right is frequently what separates a successful project from an expensive catastrophe.
For example, you don’t build a product before confirming a customer needs it. That’s business suicide. You don’t hire a hundred salespeople before you have a solution that works. That’s ridiculous. You don’t build the top floor penthouse before you pour the foundation. That’s… stupid. And right now, societally, with the space nonsense I’m going to describe to you next, we are trying to build a penthouse while the foundation is crumbling.
We have climate systems destabilizing faster than our governance structures can respond. We have a global debt crisis that is consuming the productive capacity we need to actually create the solutions. We have food and water systems under compounding stress. We have democratic institutions eroding across the developed world. And remember, we haven’t been able to create a single successful closed ecological system.
Going to space someday isn’t stupid. Going to space NOW, instead of fixing our spaceship, Earth, FIRST, is.
Alright, So what’s going on with the current “space race?” Well, it’s mostly a circus of billionaire-itis. Jeff Bezos has been selling approximately a billion dollars of Amazon stock every year to fund Blue Origin, a company whose most visible contribution to human civilization is a rocket that looks like a penis and a space tourism business charging up to $1.3 million ticket for 11 minutes of weightlessness. At $250,000 a ticket, that’s $25,000 a minute.
I should remind you, it takes an average American family four months to save as much as that per minute costs. This is the most expensive theme park ride in history, my friends. It is not exploration, it is not science, it is not advancing the human species.
And then there’s SpaceX… now, sometimes doing useful work. Remember, reusable rockets are helpful. Starlink has real benefits for the citizens of Earth. I’m not lumping those things in with Bezos’ Carnival Ride. But Elon Musk’s stated goal — a self-sustaining city on Mars — explicitly framed, by the way, as “F*** Earth” — this is catastrophically wrong in its sequence. It’s Elysium or like the delusional thinking of a James Bond villain.
And his latest fever dream, merging SpaceX and xAI to launch a million orbital A.I. data centers… it sounds kind of innovative until you do a little bit of math. Replicating a single large data center in space would require the solar array the size of 500 football fields. And here’s the real problem I don’t hear being addressed about this plan at all: A.I. hardware has an upgrade cycle of 18 to 24 months. On Earth, swapping chips means sending a truck. In space, it means launching a rocket at thousands of dollars per kilogram of cargo just to get the replacement hardware into orbit.
Meanwhile, NASA, the agency that’s supposed to represent the public’s interest in space is now completely dependent on billionaires. For real. NASA literally cannot land on the moon without Musk’s rocket working on schedule. When someone at NASA tried to hold SpaceX accountable for delays, Musk publicly attacked them on his personal megaphone, Twitter. I mean, X. Whatever. A lot of X’s around this guy. That’s not a conflict of interest. It’s a conflict of frickin’ EVERYTHING.
And now NASA wants to spend apparently $20 billion building a permanent moon base… on a surface with no atmosphere, with radiation 150 times Earth- normal and dust so abrasive it destroyed Apollo equipment within hours. The stated rationale for this, per NASA’s own administrator, isn’t science. It’s “beating China.” Or as I like to call it, a casual $20 billion game of “Capture The Flag.”
The Artemis astronauts who just orbited the moon deserve celebration. The scientists who pulled that off, genuinely brilliant. But the phallic rockets and the $25,000 per minute joy rides and the genius engineers optimizing for Mars madness while Earth systems crumble… it’s not courage. It’s not even good ambition. It’s just really expensive denial. Billionaires, please get some therapy.
The rest of us: let’s demand we fix our Spaceship Earth first.
Here’s today’s Optimistic Rebellion.
First, don’t let the billionaires colonize your sense of wonder. Space is genuinely, breathtakingly miraculous. The Earthrise photo is one of the most important images ever taken. The Artemis astronauts are extraordinary, doing an extraordinary thing. That awe is real and it belongs to all of us. Life is incredibly rare and we’re getting to live it right now. Our Optimistic Rebellion is reclaiming that sense of wonder from the vanity rockets and the fever dreams and the escape hatches and pointing our imagination and brilliance at the right problems.
Second, I want to be really clear about this, I’m not saying NEVER. I still believe a Star Trek future is possible. Multi-planetary, eventually multi-stellar human civilization. I want that future. But the Optimistic Rebellion is refusing the false choice between space NOW and space NEVER and insisting instead on the version where we actually get to have both because we did the work in the right order. We fixed the ship. We earned the next chapter.
Third, I want you to consider something DJ White said in Nate’s episode. We are already on a spaceship. Right now, during this episode, you and I are hurtling through the cosmos at incomprehensible speed on a vessel so perfectly tuned to human life that we barely notice it. There are even alien minds on our ship! Whales singing complex songs under the ice and dolphins that can learn how to use computers as fast as children can. There are ecosystems of staggering complexity that we’ve just barely begun to understand.
The adventure isn’t just out there. It’s right here. We’re already in space. Looking up is important, but it matters most when it reminds us to look down and see the miracle we’re standing on.
Original post with all source links: https://joshallan.com/2026/04/21/a-love-letter-to-spaceship-earth/
