I was just thinking about writing a rant on how tech billionaires shoot their money into space...

[MrScorpio]

All while the rest of have to deal with more terrestrial matters. But before I did that, I figured that I should just look around to see what's been written about this before.

Of course, it's out there, right?

As a matter of fact, I'm sure that we all know a lot of people have been talking about this issue for quite some time. So, whatever I was going to write, it would have just been recovering old ground. Believe it or not, I hate being redundant, even if I am sometimes.

Why reinvent the wheel, I say.

So, instead of the profane rehash of an assessment of the situation that I was surely going to write before I checked around, here's a classic article that looks great from The Guardian:

What if the mega-rich just want rocket ships to escape the Earth they destroy?
Jess Zimmerman

The early capitalists once had to breathe the air that they polluted in pursuit of their wealth. Now, perhaps, they can escape it by leaving the planet

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the latest tech billionaire to invest his money in spaceships: on Tuesday, he debuted his space travel company Blue Origin’s newest rocket. Now, those who want to cruise the galaxy can choose between the sleek new rocket and the stubbier model Bezos announced in April – or they can opt to ride with Tesla founder Elon Musk on a SpaceX ship, or hop on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

At this rate, would-be space travelers will be able to choose their favorite tech company, find its richest guy and buy a ticket on his craft of choice. Why does everyone who achieves economic dominance over the planet immediately turn around and try to get off it?

The “boys and their toys” explanation is the obvious one – once you’ve bought all the cars and boats and planes you want, why not buy a rocket? (We don’t have a “girls and their toys” ethos yet because the cards are stacked against women getting to this level of obscene wealth, but I suspect a lot of us would want to buy rocketships, too.) Space is inherently cool, and even if it weren’t, space is inherently other – which matters a lot to the man who has everything terrestrial. By the same token, someone who already has a watch that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can buy a watch that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars but comes from space.

Of course, uber-wealthy tech entrepreneurs aren’t just buying rockets for their personal amusement. They’re founding or investing in space travel – they want to get you off-planet, too. Well, not you-you, but someone like you with much, much, much more money.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/mega-rich-rocket-ships-escape-earth

[Igel]

1. The wealthy have always been privileged to look past the mundane.

Or at least those not driven by meeting mundane needs.

Innovation happens in two ways. The first and short-termiest is applying current knowledge to what's needed to help meet daily needs. We're good at that. Produce a better mousetrap and make a lot of $. But it went on before that, too. Monks were great drivers of innovations because they both had time to sit back and think and learn (founding universities and schools) and went out to earn their own bread and help those around them. A lot of Islamic innovations made their way to Europe and only *then* got applied in real life and made widespread, but the monks also applied a lot of older knowledge (or re-invented the wheel, so to speak, in some cases).

The second kind of innovation is far, far more important. Applying what we know helps people now, directly. But figuring out what we don't know increases the body of knowledge that others can apply, and often finds immediate application as well. For that you need people who *aren't* worried about where their next day's food is coming from or about where their kids will be sleeping next week. You need people who can provide funding to others to do nothing but observe, record, and think for years at a time. Kopernik, Newton come to mind. Or you need people who are intelligent and in a place where they can work: Maxwell, for instance, or Lord Kelvin, Lavoisier or even underworked Einstein in his patent office and later "producing nothing" in Princeton.

Some such wealthy folk fund musicians or artists; others fund scientists. Much of "Islamic learning" were rulers sitting on a lot of war booty and money harvested from farmers and workers who had holdings confiscated from libraries from N. Africa into N. India and who could afford to employ people as kept scholars. Now they fund endowed chairs. Sadly, most individual donors fund social-change "let's re-educate the masses" sort of chairs while it's corporations and government who are more likely to fund basic research into stuff that'll make people's lives better instead of forcing others to behave. Even then, basic research funding is down, and government-funded research tends to be very politicized. It's no different than a khalif or a robber-baron or the Kochs making sure that their money funds the research they want, but that's a level of generalization most don't want to get to: We get outraged over the latter, but government's politicizing its funding (and controlling what's done with others' funding) is just fine. It's all a matter over who's dictating, and *we* are never dictators. Just wiser and more intelligent.

Think of space exploration as straddling these two kinds of innovation, though. To some extent, they have very specific goals in mind: mine an asteroid, for instance, to get all that cobalt necessary for Teslas without engaging in blood minerals or supporting warlord thugs. In other cases, they have loftier, grander designs. Keep in mind that if a rich person gets to Mars, there'll be no coming back and unless there's support staff and enough population to make a go of it, there's no staying there, either.