“Why should we spend even one penny or one minute working on going into space when we have so many problems here on Earth that we still need to solve?”
That is by far the most common question asked of anyone working in the space community. I have been doing this for twenty-five years, and honestly I am tired of answering this question. However, I will do it here one more time.
Let me start by saying that I would defer to my fellow space professional, Will Pomerantz, who gave a TED Talk a few years ago entitled “Why we go — leaving our beautiful home and exploring outer space”. I think Will’s presentation is perhaps the most eloquent and succinct response to this question that I have ever heard, so I encourage you to watch it.
I should point out that Will’s TED Talk focused primarily on the first part of the question, namely, “Why should we go into space?” He had so much good material to present on that part that I think he just did not have time to address the second part of the question, namely, “... when we still have so many problems here on Earth?” I would like to tackle that part of the question.
There are two ways that I usually address this issue, but both are related.
Do “Space People” Hate Earth?
The first is that the question comes across as a bit of an accusation that seems to assume something that I have never seen in my entire career. It assumes that someone working in the space community would prefer to have humanity go into space rather than solve any of the many problems plaguing humanity here on Earth. However, this is completely false. I have never met anyone working in the space community who thinks that space is more important than Earth problems.
In fact, I would argue that most of the “space people” I have met are also some of the greatest humanitarians, philanthropists, environmentalists, and conservationists that I have ever met. There is something about dedicating your life to the pursuit of the vastness and harshness of space that makes you truly appreciate Earth and the frailty of human life. In fact, taken to its extreme, this logic could even imply that people who study space and work in the space community potentially have the best perspective on how important it is to solve all of Earth’s many problems.
Time for an Abundance Mindset
The second–and larger point–that I usually like to make is that this question is always stated in an “either/or” format, when every space professional I have ever met considers it an “and also” issue. We all believe that we should push humanity forward into space and also solve all of our problems here on Earth. Anyone who positions this question as an either/or situation is really approaching it from a “scarcity mindset,” where in reality we should be approaching it from an “abundance mindset.”
Why does this happen?
Well, taking a scarcity mindset makes sense historically. After all, until a few years ago, space was the exclusive purview of a small handful of national governments. These governments had finite budgets from which they needed to allocate funds for space. By definition, every penny that was allocated to space programs was a penny that could not be allocated elsewhere. Therefore, it made sense–maybe as recently as twenty years ago–to ask this question. After all, why should the US government, for example, spend even one penny on NASA when it also needs that penny to help build roads, hospitals, homeless shelters, and schools, and to support important programs like social security and medicare?
This is probably a good spot for a side note. Even when people were asking this question in the context of the US federal budget, very few actually knew the numbers they were talking about. Every few years, studies are conducted asking random people how much of the Federal budget they think goes to NASA. The answers are almost consistently between ten and thirty percent. In reality, NASA’s budget is less than one half of one percent. So, even taking a penny away from NASA is not really going to make a big dent in some of the other important federal programs.
Regardless, what was true when Will did his TED talk and is even more true today–more than ten years later–is that space has become increasingly globalized and privatized. While NASA and the national space programs in China, Europe, Russia, Japan, and India continue to play significant roles, today just about every country has at least some space activities and also every year billions of dollars are pumped into new space ventures by private investors. The relatively modest slices of national budgets dedicated to space are now dwarfed by the amount of private capital available around the world. Again, this is no longer an “either/or” question but rather an “and also” question.
However, for many reasons, people still tend to have trouble adopting an abundance mindset. They still contend that even if we took a global and public/private view, we should still ask why space instead of Earth. We see this every time someone in the mass media asks why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and other wealthy individuals are spending their money on space instead of helping the rest of us on Earth. (By the way, the obvious flaw in that line of questioning is that it conveniently ignores the fact that Musk, Bezos, Branson, and others also give millions of dollars every year to support organizations working to solve non-space problems here on Earth.)
Regardless, let us use this as a jumping off point for a thought exercise.
Let’s solve all the world’s problems!
A few years ago, Elon got into a Twitter spat with David Beasley, the head of the World Food Programme. I am paraphrasing, but essentially Beasley said that Elon could eradicate world hunger if he would just donate six billion dollars to the World Food Programme. Elon replied that he would be happy to do so, if Beasley could provide transparency into how the funds would be used to provide food directly to those who needed it. After Beasley clarified that he meant six billion dollars per year, the high-profile spat eventually just died out quietly.
However, this exchange provides a good framework for bringing an abundance mindset to the question at hand.
Let us assume that Beasely was correct but underestimated. Let us assume that we could eradicate world hunger, but for, say, ten billion dollars per year. That is one of the many problems facing humanity on Earth today, and we could solve it with “only” ten billion dollars per year.
And how many other problems do we want to solve?
Well, a few years ago the United Nations adopted its Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This is a collection of seventeen interlinked global goals designed to be “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” They include David Beasley’s goal of eradicating world hunger (which is SDG number two), as well as other critical issues like poverty, health, education, gender equality, clean water, energy, etc. While this is likely not a comprehensive list, for the purposes of this thought exercise we could use it as a proxy for questioning better uses of space resources.
Now let us assume that we want to eradicate all seventeen of the issues covered by the United Nations’ SDGs. In fact, let us allow some leeway and assume that the United Nations left out a few, so let us call it an even twenty issues.
Let us also assume that Beasley’s low-ball estimate to eradicate world hunger could be a proxy for eradicating each of the other issues, so we can estimate ten billion dollars per year for each of the twenty issues, which gives us $200 billion per year for humanity to solve twenty of our most pressing issues.
In fact, let us assume that this is also a low-ball figure because some issues (say, health) may require more than the ten billion dollars per year needed for world hunger. Therefore, let us take the $200 billion per year and double it to $400 billion. In fact, let us increase it by another 25% to an even $500 billion just to make it easier to do some high-level math. What we end up with is an estimated budget of $500 billion per year to completely solve all of the world’s problems today.
Can humanity actually afford $500 billion per year?
Well, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) for 2025 was estimated to be $118 trillion. That is “trillion” with a “T,” or 1,000 billions. Let us call it an even $100 trillion, again for ease of calculation.
This means that we could solve all of the world’s issues if we simply dedicated a mere one half of one percent of our annual global GDP to this effort.
That is all.
$10B x 20 =$200B
$200B x 2 = $400B
$400B x 1.25 = $500B
$500B / $100T = 0.5%
Think about this, and let it sink in.
Yes, I admit that my model is quite basic and perhaps oversimplified. However, my general point remains: clearly the world has more than enough financial resources to solve all of our many problems. We also have more than enough human capital to solve these problems, since our global population is more than eight billion people.
So why do all of these problems still exist?
That is a very difficult and complex question, and honestly I do not know if I have a great answer for it. Regardless, that would be the subject for a completely different article. For the purposes of this narrative, I just wanted to refute the notion that the “why space?” question should come from a scarcity mindset when clearly it is much more rational to approach it from an abundance mindset.
So the next time someone asks, “Why should we spend even one penny or one minute working on going into space when we have so many problems here on Earth that we still need to solve?” my simple answer will be, “Because we can do both.”
We are fortunate enough to live during an unprecedented time in human history when we have an abundance of resources at our disposal. We have the financial resources, the human resources, the technological resources, and the natural resources to both make humanity a multi-planetary species and also solve all of our problems here on Earth.
It is just a matter of getting it done.
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