Does the Billionaire Space Race Benefit Humanity?

On this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we talked with Dr. Randall Milstein. He is the Astronomer in Residence for Oregon’s NASA space Grant consortium, housed at Oregon State University.  He is not a NASA employee, but he works regularly to further NASA’s mission.  

We sat down to talk to him about whether there are any benefits to humanity from the billionaire space race.  Dr. Milstein believes there are some pure scientific benefits that can come from this—though he acknowledges the criticisms that say if these billionaires wanted to spend more money to alleviate problems on earth they certainly have enough money to do so as well as fund space travel.  He doesn’t see it as an either or, and in fact, we talk about what benefits space science has for bettering life on earth.  We also talk about the difference between space exploration and space colonization and here Dr. Milstein thinks that the aspirations for living in space need to be tempered by some reality.  There is no planet B and the hope to escaping a dying planet are pure science fiction fantasy.  So how can we continue to think about space science while acknowledging the very real problems of a deeply inequitable and unjust world?