Solve all our problems
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have problems, xkcd and others contended, we’d never be able to go to space if we had to spend all our time, money, and labours fixing them. The snark implied in #1232 was warranted.
But recently, I saw this comic used in a different context: during a conversation (in a private group) about Elon Musk’s aggression with SpaceX and his plans to colonise the moon and visit Mars in his lifetime. Insofar as #1232 pushed back against space exploration that couldn’t by any measure subtract from public spending on socio-economic welfare and justice, it was clever and good. But in the conversation in the group, #1232 donned a new implication: of reducing any other (even minimally) legitimate criticism of the world’s plans to land probes on the moon, establish lunar bases, and start the human campaign to permanently settle the moon and of Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s plans to being an argument about spending on space exploration subtracting from more immediately measurable pursuits.
Two arguments come to mind that are poorly served by such flattening. First: the pace at which SpaceX has been manufacturing satellites, launching rockets, and expanding its satellite constellations is at odds with its, and our, ability to deal with the environmental footprint of these activities. Neither SpaceX nor Musk have made any provisions for the activities to be sustainable and they should asap. Doing so might slow the company down, and the company needs to stop considering this retardation to be undesirable. Yet SpaceX’s supporters have often construed any criticism of the company’s pace to be criticism of the company altogether and as the argument that its money would be better spent doing other things.
Second: I was recently asked a curious question during a formal engagement at work. Is it ethical for India to spend so much on Gaganyaan considering we live in a world with war, violence, and poverty? Gaganyaan has so far cost the Indian government more than Rs 11,000 crore. But there are a couple underlying assumptions here, leading up to questions of the ethicality of human spaceflight, that are flawed.
(i) The allocation of resources for various activities isn’t a zero-sum game in India. The national budget is voluminous enough for the government to fund both human spaceflight and poverty alleviation programmes. Also unlike in game theory, fractional outcomes are possible and possibly more desirable. For example, India can make great strides in its poverty alleviation programme if it diverts only 0.1% of its defence spending (Rs 6.2 lakh crore in 2024-2025) that way.
(ii) Many of us like to believe if we don’t spend money on X, it will be available for Y. (Here, X could be ’spaceflight’ and Y could be ‘alleviating poverty’.) We don’t stop to ask whether the state will divert it to Z instead (say, ‘missiles’). If we’d like to guarantee X → Y, we need to persuade the state to rejig its existing priorities and prevent X → Z. Expecting ISRO to not pursue Gaganyaan with funds provided by the state isn’t reasonable.
In sum, it seems like the “let’s first fix all problems on Earth” argument has become both straw man and red herring in conversations about off-world human activities whose benefits aren’t entirely clear at the moment. The real problem is of course that the benefits aren’t clear, not that the activities are happening at all, plus the belief that money spared by not performing one activity will automatically become available for the precise alternative activity we’re rooting for.
