Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Why humans matter — The philosophy of Artemis II

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

When Artemis II returned its crew safely to Earth, millions of people found themselves unexpectedly moved. The mission was a test flight, a proof-of-concept, and yet it felt like something far greater than the sum of its parts. In this episode, Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, sits down with Rebecca Lowe, philosophy senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, to explore the deeper meaning of humanity's return to deep space. Drawing on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and theories of value, they unpack why human presence in space feels fundamentally different from even the most sophisticated robotic mission, and why that difference matters. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/spe-philosophy-of-artemis-iiSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society, welcoming you to another episode that explores the processes and policies behind space exploration. This month, I had to talk about Artemis, too. The first lunar mission that I got to experience in my lifetime as it happened, at least a lunar mission with humans. I think actually most people alive on Earth today had never experienced that as well. The mission itself went flawlessly.

Well, maybe except for the toilet. But overall, the astronauts returned safely. The spacecraft performed as expected. And it opened up a new era of deep space exploration for humans. No longer are humans trapped in Earth orbit. Now, obviously, it's just the beginning. This was a test flight. The big missions will be coming down the line.

Artemis 4 now will be the first attempted lunar landing, followed by regular, hopefully, access to the lunar surface and thereabouts going forward in the late 2020s. Artemis 2 was an interesting experience for me. Obviously, I have followed space very closely, far too closely compared to many people. but there was something about the experience of writing along with the astronauts themselves, seeing their interactions, their professionalism, their courage, their obvious fondness for each other.

There were parts that were incredibly moving, like naming a crater after the late wife of Commander Reed Weissman. There were moments of pure joy. The pictures were stunning. despite, frankly, not having a ton of scientific value, but they were aesthetically astonishing. And I kept going back to this idea of why, why does it feel so different than looking at similar pictures or even better pictures, more scientifically productive and useful pictures provided by the lunar reconnaissance orbiter

or any number of lunar missions, robotic missions that have been to the similar area of space? Going down that pathway starts to get pretty heady. To help me unpack this in a productive and grounded way, someone who has a lot of expertise in thinking about meaning and value and formal definitions and logical progressions of such, I reached out to Rebecca Lowe. She is the philosophy senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She's the host of multiple podcasts, including working definition.

and a new one with another philosopher called The Street Porter and the Philosopher. She writes a substact called The Ends Don't Justify the Means. And she has been on the show before in one of my most enjoyable past episodes. She is an incredible and insightful thinker, very well read, obviously, with her background and philosophy. And very interested in this interplay of value and meaning and human relationship to space exploration itself. So she joins me on this episode to unpack the sense the value, the ways in which we assess value from Artemis II.

The ways in which Artemis II means something, maybe even bigger than itself. And again, even if the scientific value is modest, which I think it is, that the mission itself has value far beyond that. Before we get to that discussion, I need to make sure that you know the Planetary Society, my organization, the organization that produces this show is a public member organization. It is funded by small donors across the world. We don't answer to large aerospace corporations. We don't answer to government.

We don't take government funding, which has been incredibly important for our policy and advocacy work over the last few years. But just in broad sense, we. We represent people, people who love space science and people who love space exploration. We do our job every day, particularly here in the policy and advocacy program, working in places like Washington, D.C., running things like our Day of Action, which just brought more than 130 people on their own dime and on their own time to Washington, D.C., in order to promote and advocate against cuts to NASA and space science. and it depends and actually requires the independence provided by small donors. Hopefully like you, but if not like you, not you yet. Please consider joining.

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And now, my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Lowe. Rebecca Lowe, thank you for coming back to the space policy edition. Thanks so much for having me back. We both watched, followed quite closely, Artemis, too. and we were talking the other day and you told me kind of a delightful story about the, I believe, the launch of Artemis II

and how you experienced that, but also kind of built out and brought a number of people around it who may not have known it was happening. Tell us that story. Yeah, so I was at, you're going to say the pub, it was in a bar because I'm in America.

With some of my friends, on a Wednesday afternoon, we have a philosophy working group that I run at McKay just where I work. And I've instituted this norm that as English people do and also as philosophers do, after the philosophy session, we go to the pub to talk about philosophy.

One of my fellow philosophers suggested we go to a new bar. And I was like, well, the only condition on this is there has to obviously be a television because our time at the bar is going to coincide with launch. And he said, yeah, don't worry, I've been there, but all there's loads of big TVs, it will be perfect. So we got to the bar as a group of us, the philosophers. And the sports are playing, because as you know, in American bars, they play sports multiple sports,

even if you're in a hotel bar, wherever you are, any bar has sports playing. And we said to the guy who came over to, you know, so we could order our drinks, hey, is it okay to put on the Artemis launch?

He said, oh, no, we don't play news channels here. We have a policy against it. So we had about 45 minutes to try to persuade this guy that he should put the launch on the TV. We all had our laptops out watching it.

Finally, he agreed. you guys can watch it for the last three minutes but of course it wasn't just us guys it was everyone else and it was very exciting and it was a lovely moment and the bar guy himself watched it too so that was nice but it was funny to me

that it took some persuasion it makes you wonder what he thought it was when he was worried about showing news it's a rocket launch it's not a statement necessarily beyond it or maybe it is to some people I agree I think it my guess is they just have a blanket ban on news channels per se. But I agree. This seems to me very reductive. And hopefully,

maybe, who knows, maybe there's going to be a change of policy. We'll go back next time. No news unless it's a rocket launch. So you can, you can count on with that. I mean, that really seems to sum up Artemis too quite a bit. I mean, a colleague of mine was at Cape Canaveral and did interviews on the, you know, on the streets, you know, kind of just around NASA Center. and even people around there didn't know necessarily that Artemis was happening. I thought it was fascinating that more people watched the landing, the return, splashdown, I should say, than the launch itself. And that suggests to me that it was, you know, obviously it was happening over the course of like 10 days and it was in the news a lot.

But it feels like there's something deeper going on. And this is what I'm really interested in exploring with you about how the society's relationship to the idea may have changed during those 10 days, that something that was not even maybe feasible became real and immediate in a way that was almost to be dismissed before. To experience that myself and to feel like my own relationship with this. Looking back at Artemis to now that we have kind of the benefit of that, it was a successful mission, they all got back safely. Let's even before I get into my experience, what was your experience then beyond

that as someone who has been, you know, involved in space or like followed space, talks about things about space quite a bit. I was like to watch that as a living person. I thought it's amazing. I mean, just on an aesthetic level, I thought it was incredibly beautiful. I told that about the Splashdown and the Long. The Splashdown in particular, actually, there were these very iconic moments, I think, of it hurtling. First of all, hortling towards a very, very kind of beautiful, almost monochrome image, and then suddenly the blue with the beautiful colors of the parachutes, I think you could see those becoming sort of art objects in themselves. So there's this great aesthetic benefit of both of these things.

I think also, and I think this may, possibly, if I could posit some kind of simplistic answer to your question around, why did more people watch the splashdown? I do wonder if there was a kind of over heightened sense of anxiety from some people about the launch. I mean, launch, people think, oh, the launch is very dangerous. Maybe people had memories of Challenger Columbia. Maybe they were anxious. I certainly saw quite a lot of chat. I mean, I don't know, the science guy, one of my, you know, group chats, it's all about the WhatsApp group chats.

It was warning everybody, oh, you know, the private sector's involved. There's less security than there were in NASA days. It might all go wrong. And then it didn't go wrong, in fact, it all went really, really well. So maybe there's also just a sense of, I don't want to watch something horrible. I do think that's an overly simplistic understanding. And I also agree with you. I mean, I think you were implying there is just a sense of interest building over that period of time.

There's an interesting thing to be said, though, because the counter to the idea of the launch being more dangerous. And we can, you know, it will be empirical answers to whether it or not. That's not the thing I'm saying, but the perception it's more dangerous. dangerous is, of course, that is also more exciting on some level. Yeah. So then you think if the interest had been at the level that it was for the splashdown and that was the launch, would you have had even more viewers? I think there are these interesting.

Again, these are broadly empirical questions, not ones for philosophers to answer. But I think my guess is there is probably some complicated psychological stuff going on, as well as just a pure lack of information, knowledge, which is, to my mind, very sad. That said, one final thing I would say, I read a piece in The New York Times a couple days before the launch, which reported on sort of looking back over kind of polling data over the decades. I was quoted in that piece, I believe. I think you were. I saw you. And it was quite interesting to see that the only month where Americans, at least according to this data, thought that taxpayer spend on NASA was worthwhile, was the very month in which.

Sheeniel Armstrong, set foot on the moon. And then it was, what, was it, like 51% or 53%? Yeah, barely more than half, huh? Right. So I do think possibly, I mean, we're talking relatively, but at the same time, it may be the case that people overstate interest in this stuff back in the day, too. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that's worked by Roger Launius, looking at the public opinions of Apollo over time.

And his whole conclusion is that it was not that popular. while, I mean, it was a bit more complex than what I just said. People liked it, but they didn't think it was worth it. And that's that that key question was worth it. And so when Nixon was wound down the program in early 70s, he was in step with public opinion. That was people weren't eager to keep spending at that level, you know, roughly $45 billion a year, adjusted for inflation. You know, NASA spent over $300 billion in 12 years to do Apollo the first time. And a Apollo didn't reach this kind of broad. I mean, you also had the classic Gilhatskaren, you know, kind of a piece of Yady on the moon. And you had obviously a lot of mixed feelings. And culture had certainly changed a lot between 1961 and 1969 in the United States. And that's what I think is actually really key for my experience,

where I was born after that, like you were. Like actually most people alive right now. And you can look at some of this polling data that Roger Lounnius has put together. And most people for decades, had kind of a mixed view of Apollo, whether it was worth it. Not until the mid-1990s, when suddenly there was the step-function jump in public opinion. And there's no good explanation except for that's when the movie Apollo 13 came out.

And it's like, I think you can actually like pinpoint that moment when Apollo moved from experience into myth, right? It moved like firmly into the era of history and myth and it became romanticized. That's when we were a country, damn it. You know, like that's when we could do things. that's when John Kennedy, like, stood before and said, we will go to the moon and never mind those other things that he talked about. Like, we were going to the moon and by God, we did it.

And it became, I think that's how I experienced Apollo growing up. And that's how I think most people have seen it now at this age, which has its pitfalls. Because then when you try to recreate this perceived golden era of history, you succumb and you ignore the messiness of it, I think. and you are trying to now replicate something through maybe nostalgic pursuit rather than acknowledging the messy difficulties of actually making it work. It may just also be easier to kind of post hoc justify something when the cost isn't current.

When someone else has paid it past tense already. True. Yeah, I mean, because that was at the time, Apollo at the time, I mean, the US was not running any kind of significant budget deficit back then. And so Apollo was paid for and in very much a way this current program is not. Right. I mean, that's a kind of general problem at the moment, putting burdens on future generations. But to that point, when I witnessed Artemis II and when I was watching it, so I was actually commentating on TV for it and I was convinced it would just not launch because I was there for the first attempt for Artemis 1.

It didn't launch for months. And I just almost didn't believe it could happen. And so that was the experience for me was actually having something rooted in myth, basically, and this ideal that we could never achieve again suddenly happened in front of me. Do you think there's also something to be said for now our ease of access to watch these things?

You can watch rocket launches all the time and therefore, you know, the ordinary person on the street or at least the sufficiently ordinary person who's all doing to watching rocket launches knows how often they have to be delayed. Whereas in the past, it would only be the really big things. And there's also then questions about iterative stuff and all kinds of different approaches. But when you can watch all of the things, including the things where it seems much, much less likely for it to happen, because, you know, for various reasons, then your expectation isn't as high.

Very possible. I mean, it depends kind of what your engagement to with the space program is. I'm, you know, a freak out liar. Like, you know, probably most people who listen to the show compared to the average person. on the street. But, you know, there was, I felt like there's been, and maybe you've encountered this over the years, there's like a certain type of person who's almost been like personally insulted by the lack of moon trips, you know, in their lifetime since Apollo. Like, you promised me, you know, a moon base, you know, 50 years ago, damn it. And we still don't have it.

And they become so pissed off about it. And this idea that this can't happen, right, that there's just no way this can't without something radical changing, which is kind of leads into the future of this. It's interesting actually that your friend said that the private space involved. This is like the last echo of like classic aerospace contracting. This was Lockheed Boeing all the way, kind of a mission and kind of like their big swan song in a way, right, that they pulled this off. It worked really well, very expensive kind of boutique spacecraft that they made here. But this idea that NASA can't do it, the moon was always forever out of reach almost, I think, played into my experience of watching it, which is like this almost can't work.

anymore. And I think that almost goes back to maybe what, when I'm going to main topic here is about what is the value of this mission and how do we measure that type of value and hopefully leveraging some of your philosophical tools of value definition to play here. But it almost, I think it like reasserted a certain amount of capability. And I wonder, particularly within NASA itself, did you experience anything of that too? Did you have a kind of cynical streak when it comes to like the application of space exploration from your engagement with it? I mean, that's a great question. I am the eternal optimist about absolutely everything.

I just have a very optimistic personality. I think it's something I'm very lucky about. I don't think it's something I've generated in myself. Although I do try to do things to maintain it. Like I live in America rather than England. I'm running cynical in England. So I think I'm probably less likely than other people to go into watching something like that, assuming it's not going to happen, even though I'm aware of the stats and things.

and thinking about the weather and all of those kind of unfixable matters. I would say, so one thing I was thinking about in terms of the difference today from our discussion last time, is we talked about this in a very abstract sense, didn't we, in terms of space exploration, certainly human space exploration, and now here we are on the other side, and it's happening again. That's just a non-aunt point, but I think it gives us the opportunity to kind of apply or have some particular example to think about So last time we talked in the abstract about things like space exploration, furthering human knowledge. Yeah. Things like, and of course, this isn't to deny that there has been space exploration happening

in between the Apollo era and now. Of course, it's been happening. In fact, you know, we've sent off a load of probes. We've had a lot of robots up there doing very exciting things. And that's my bag. That's right, which exactly so, which indeed increased human knowledge on Earth. But some of the other things we talked about, so for instance, experience the opportunity for humans to actually be there and experience things.

We're back fresh into that and that's very, very exciting, I think. It's a new kind of, it's experiential knowledge, different kind of knowledge. Now we have better video footage. People can follow it along much more clearly. I was reminded of this very beautiful thing you said in the last podcast where you talked about the importance of vision in the sense of being able to see stuff up in the sky. And I think there's a kind of derived sense in which that is enhanced by new kind of camera technology. And I mean, now you can watch every little bit from every little angle.

Yeah. Of course, that's contrasted with the quite blurry iPhone footage that everyone has been sharing. But you know what it's like when you watch a launch online these days, you get all these different angles. You can see it from inside the machine. I mean, it's very exciting. and it's just this kind of on the spot access all across the world, even if you're on your laptop in the bar because the guy won't put it on the TV, is just entirely different from the Apollo Age in a very, very immediate sense.

The immediacy, absolutely. I think that's like a huge difference. The Earthrise photo from Apollo 8, no one saw that until after they'd gotten back and two weeks later after they developed the film, right? It was weeks. And it's only recently that a lot of those things have, been taken out of the deep freeze. Yeah.

Those photographs. I mean, I love the photo books of some of those glorious pictures, you know, from right across the earlier NASA missions. But a lot of them had just been sitting there. I mean, thank God they preserved them. Right. But whereas now, you don't have to go through all of those processes. You literally have it beamed onto your phone.

You're like swiping with your thumb and like, you're like, okay, this, this, someone doing something silly. And then like, oh, view of the earth from the moon. Okay, go, go, go. You know, it's just like, does that almost like cheapen it, though? Like, that's, it kind of like pulls it into this, uh, the stream of feed of overstimulation. Yeah, makes it ordinary. I mean, there's a wonderful way in which that's become ordinary.

I mean, what astonishing progress we've made for that to be something, banal. Yeah. Isn't that? What a luxury, ultimate luxury. Yeah. Yeah. I also thought the, the video of inside the capsule. I mean, that's, we got so much.

more, you know, again, we would see these TV broadcast from Apollo, but this is like low, you know, quality video, brief moments, broadcast on TV. And here where it's almost like a stream, you could just follow along. You could stream into mission control. Like that immediacy was incredible and the openness was incredible. I think it also contrasted to me the fundamental value of a public program. Yeah. With more of this idea of like, please pay attention to it. Like here, take it everything. We are giving it to you. Just pay attention to look what we're doing versus the private aspect of space, which is public to the degree that it's relevant to their bottom line, right? That it's good for their interest. And the moment it's not, they won't do it

because they have no public desire or ownership or responsibility to serve that. Yeah, I like that. I think, for instance, I mean, I have quite strong news, for instance, that state actors have very particular obligations to be transparent. I think programs funded by the taxpayer, there is an obligation, not just to inform the taxpayer about what's going on, but to enable the taxpayer to feel involved when it's something like this. I feel like there are these extra obligations around, you know, education around sharing around, not just in terms of holding state actors to account, but in terms of enabling the kind of sharing of the benefits, there are a massive, you know, alternative X and HALTIs to be taken from this. And if part of the justification for doing

this is to further human knowledge, which I think is an easy part of the argument to make. Then some obligations come from that. Even watching them try to fix a broken toilet. I mean, like, that level of like mundane and certainly not like what they want, that was like what half of some of the press. That gets the kids into thinking about engineering and good times. But just, I mean, but that's like part of that honesty with it, right? That they, and that.

The normality again. I mean, what an amazing thing. I mean, you spoke about, you know, dealing a, you know, and I think I share this too. There's a sense of rich people who grew up when we did, might feel a little short change that we didn't get to be, you know, going off to the space hotel or in the flying cars. But all of a sudden, here we are. And this stuff has become normal. This stuff has become banal and we can joke about it and we can see the ins and outs and we can follow it. And I mean, we're there, aren't we?

I mean, how astonishing is that that this thing can become normal? Yeah, I had that moment where it broke out of, or it kind of maybe broke through in my brain when I saw the conversation between the Artemis 2 crew and the ISS crew. Yeah. And a space station crew is talking to a moon voyager crew. Yeah, it's just like something just sounds so incredible about that. And the astronauts themselves were like they could not get over. They were so excited to be doing that. But then the point of conversation was the most like, hey, how's the green beans?

Like, do you have the same spicy green beans we do? And it's like that contrast of the banal with the like the incredible, which I guess is the essence of human spaceflight, right? It's the simultaneous, the most exciting and boring thing to do, particularly if you're just sitting and like, you know, floating around. We're not floating around, but like waiting to go float around. That was just a remarkable moment. And that's what really got me thinking again, again, what the value of this mission was. I have, you know, reflected on, you know, the pictures that they've taken. And I think you brought up the aesthetic sense of them is really.

spectacular. And I love, I think like most people love seeing those pictures, I love seeing pictures of people themselves. But it's not even, as you said, that with the iPhone image is like, that's kind of a blurry iPhone video. And it was the value of that wasn't even the aesthetic sense. It was the almost the unifying or, you know, everyone knows what it's like to shoot a bad iPhone video pretty much. That's right. That's right. Shared experience enables you to have some kind of access, not kind of drive access to their experience. there. Why does it seem so critical that humans are, in a sense, witnessing this event rather than getting the same thing from a robotic spacecraft? Why does that feel so differently? Are there

tools, this is kind of why I wanted to investigate. Are there philosophical tools that allow this kind of personal connection or projection or shared experience because there's another soul, basically experiencing something out there? I think it's a question that has quite broad application value at the moment in terms of emerging technology more generally. So I'm quite interested in this question about the difference, for instance, between a poem that has been written by AI and a poem that's been written by a human. And I think it speaks to the same kind of thing, which is I think we have a natural interest in things that other members of our species do, right?

So if a human being does something amazing, there might be some sense in which it, maybe it furthers our aspirations, maybe we feel some sense. of pride, we see it as a human achievement. And I think that's the case when humans go into space. And they're all kinds of interesting. And you can also have quite cynical takes on how this can be used politically. So that's point one. Point two, I think beyond that is something like it might tell us something particular

about the kinds of things we are as creatures. So again, to use the analogy of the human poem and the AI poem, I wrote something on myself recently about, I'm very, very interested in reading AI poetry. I think it would be very good poetry. But my assumption is there will remain demand for human poetry, not just because of this idea of it's something, some kind of sense of derived achievement or something,

but because creating art objects is done in some particular way by humans, there's some sense of intention, which I think you replied. There's some sense of expressing something about what it is to be human. So it doesn't just represent achievement. It also represents something like the human experience, something like that. And I think art objects are a good example of this. Because if you take a poem, for instance, it can be intense, it can be romantic, it can be expressive, it can be all of these things.

I think it summarizes human capacities quite well. But similarly, I think when people achieve things like going to new places, learning new knowledge, that just means something very specific in a way, which a robot doing it doesn't. Yeah, it's almost some sort of animate perspective where you need the idea of a, I'm going to just return to this idea of the soul for whatever that, you know, just as a placeholder for kind of roughly what that means. But you need to know that a soul is on the other end of that in order to apply value,

almost, and meaning that it's trying to say anything. And that's interesting you bring that up with, I think the AI poetry, I'll have to read your piece, but that's a really interesting comparison because reading AI writing or novels or an AI essay, I would never seek out an essay to read the, the reading I do of AI text is purely extractive. What's the information I'm getting out of this? Exactly. Exactly. And I thought about this too at much more superficial level, of course, but this idea that it, because there's nothing it can say because there's no, I mean, I guess this is what the debate now is the the, the Nagleish kind of, is it. something to be that AI. Even if there were something, it would be to be an AI. It would not be the same thing than it is to be a human. So the AI can't experience what it's like to be a human.

Therefore, the AI writing about human experience is lacking in something. I mean, my personal view is the AI. There is nothing it's like to be AI. I don't even think it's a particular thing. I have these niche philosophical views about it. So if it can't even be, if it's not even a thing it's like to be AI, there certainly isn't a thing it's like for an AI to be a human. But you don't even need to go that far.

You can just say, even if there were such a thing as to be AI, it's not the same is the thing it is to be human. We have a particular interest in humans speaking to the human experience. So I think you can make a similar analogous move, which is something like, look, one of the benefits of sending a spacecraft into space is that we can derive new knowledge, right? So we can learn stuff about whether there are shimpy things on the moons of Saturn. That's very important for us to know that. We might learn things which enable us to make new medical advances.

So knowledge can be furthered. Similarly, when humans go into space, knowledge can be furthered. There might be different kinds of knowledge that maybe you learn some things about the human body in space that you couldn't learn from just the spacecraft. But then there's this extra element, which is the experiential element. And I think that's very important. And yes, you're absolutely right. It speaks to this kind of phenomenological sense of consciousness, this sense of there being something it's like to be Casey, their being this kind of internal introspective power, this idea that it's not just that stuff happens to us, but we're aware of it.

And it's a whole extra world. It's a whole extra thing. And we could talk about that in terms of the distinction between gaining knowledge from the spacecraft collecting information and actually experiencing the thing. And yeah, the problem then comes, of course, that us here on Earth, we can only derive that value from the astronauts. Although, like you say, we have new ways of accessing kind of what it's like in the sense of seeing the footage. But at least it's the kind of thing like us that's doing. it and they can come and they can report and give testimony to it. Yeah.

And I just think this is, witness, right? They're almost coming back. I have come, I have gone and crossed the threshold into the heavens. I have seen the earth from 200,000 miles above. We can see pictures of that, but there's something fundamentally compelling about, ironically, about someone using their words to tell you that based on their experience, beyond just seeing the same shared picture.

And I can't, I don't know why that is. That's like I can't put my finger on exactly why that is. And I'm sure other people have thought about that to more depth than I have. I think it may speak again to something like the special qualities of human-created art. I mean, I've recently got to know through you, thanks, this fantastic space photographer Michael Saldori. I think he has convinced me, not that I really needed convincing, but I have extra reasons from, you know, talking with him, from looking at his wonderful photographs of the kind of the special, sense in which space gives us access to beauty. I think as human beings we have an interest in

beauty. I'm interested philosophically in what beauty is and what the truths of beauty are and those kinds of things. But it seems to me there's just a sufficient reason to go into space. You explore the beauty of space. It's probably going to be harder to persuade people to put up their 15 cents a day or whatever as we talked about last time for those reasons. But it does seem like nonetheless it's a separate reason aside from the kind of epistemological reasons or the experiential reasons. It's a whole domain. And you might get onto this

when you also think about things like music, why music is valuable. This kind of aesthetic type of argument. There's something special. And again, that's something that the human, the spacecraft can't experience beauty. The spacecraft can't benefit from beauty. Whereas the humans can, and yes, you're right,

they can then come and tell us about it. And that in itself can be beautiful, too. The writing can be beautiful. That can be one of the points of value about their reportage, that it can have a kind of beauty, and it's a new kind of beauty. It's a new kind of beauty just purely in the sense that nobody has been there before, or at least pretty soon they'll be going to places where nobody's been before. In fact, they did go places this time. But you know what I'm saying? I mean, there's a possibility of not just the writing being beautiful, but reporting on new kinds of beautiful things.

This is a kind of slightly airy, fairy philosophy's argument, but I do think it's under-experture. Lord, and I think people like Michael would be wonderful photographs can help us to appreciate that and the importance as human beings of being able to access beauty. We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Greetings Bill Nye here, chief ambassador of the Planetary Society. Last year, you showed up and it made all the difference. Tens of thousands of you sent message. to Congress, you traveled to Washington, you made your voices heard, and together we stopped

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So please check out planetary.org slash take action. And together we can carry on, keep exploring, and change the world. Thank you. What happens then when that separation is the same picture

taken by a robotic spacecraft, it's still, you know, someone, human hands still planned that observation. Human brains still look at the same, I mean, they're not seeing the same thing. They're seeing electronic, representation of photons that were captured on a CCD, there's just one step missing, right? There's on the immediate receiving end and the immediate, I guess maybe the intent, the immediate

intent, it's like mediated by a few steps of just, but I mean, functionally it's the same, right? And there are, I don't think we're not saying, there are incredibly beautiful pictures taken by robotic spacecraft. And again, that's the, I trade, that's my part and parcel of like trading in what I do. But as you're saying, though, that they're, this. is what I'm trying to understand. Why is having a human there seemingly add value? And is it that they are the implied risk that they themselves have put in creates a sense of meaning because they are, you know, how the difficulty itself of putting them there? Is it something about the immediate intent with the flaws inherent in it? Right? Because the pictures themselves that come

back from Artemis two astronauts, they're not as good in terms of, they're, The scientific, the epistemological value of Artemis 2 is not much. It's, and to the extent that there is, it's primarily, you know, tautological. It's itself like it tells you more about humans going into deep space. So humans can go into deep space more. Or it gives you these bigger kind of perception pictures of the moon, but the moon is already well mapped, right? They're not revealing anything new. And if you zoom into those pictures, you see that they're a little blurry.

Because unlike robotic spacecraft, they can't slew their camera perfectly to, offset their rotational or their, you know, their horizontal motion relative to the target. But yet, you know, but yet, but yet, but yet, but yet, but yet, there still seems like the, the experience of watching that, like, it surprised me how moved I was at that experience, despite all of the lacking of this broader kind of epistemological benefit that we always talk about. There's no, you know, they're not doing something for the first time, right? They're, They're redoing something. And this is where I keep going back again, because it was four souls on the end of that that were behind the camera.

And I can't, I don't know why that feels that way to me. So I think a couple of ideas. One is something, and I think you put this nicely, it's to do with the risk or it's to do with the particular achievement, to do with the fact that humans managed to do this thing. The problem with that, though, is that you should feel that regardless of how beautiful the photograph is, I think. Or at least you can separate it out. I think there's maybe something to be said, and you said about intention. To my mind, it's not just about the output, it's about the inputs as well. So, you know, the robotic arm might have taken the exact same photograph.

In fact, maybe the robotic arm just took a billion photographs and this one, the AI, selected it as the one that's going to be most appealing to human eyes or something like that. But then that misses the sense that some particular person thought, I found that beautiful, or I found that interesting, or I found that important. and bid on it. They picked it. They made a choice. Now, of course, you're going to again get the problem. You're going to say, oh, but Rebecca, sometimes the greatest photographs are taken by accident, or they just do the shutter speed thing and they take thousands of pictures and they happen to catch the one where, I don't know, the person catches baseball or whatever it is. But I do think, usually when we're thinking about the value of particular art objects, that are photographs or paintings, we tend to find it hard to separate that out from the intentions of the artist.

Now, people who are interested in aesthetics debate about this stuff all the time, the role that intention plays. But I think at least on an ordinary account, people do care about that stuff. They still care that it was, you know, Da Vinci that painted the Last Supper in the same way that they cared that their favorite, you know, op-ed columnist wrote the piece. You can give them a thousand pieces in the words of that columnist. I just, my assumption is the demand will retain for the particular person doing the particular thing.

And I think this comes back to this point that you made about intention. It's somebody making some choices, being deliberate about it, picking something out. And we, aside from anything else, that just, we relate to it. We all have time cost. We do this instead of this and we do this instead of that. And we vote on things. We make choices about things. And it matters when we talk to other humans about how they make those choices, why they make those choices.

And in the creation of a photograph, we want to say to the photographer, you know, why did you take that particular photograph? But what were the circumstances in which you were able to do that thing? And, you know, with the robot, there is no thing to give you reasons. We care about reasons. There is no thing to give you explanations to give you justifications. But still with the robot, the team has told the robot. I mean, there is intention. There are justifications, right?

It's just mediated through that robot. This is a great point. And to be honest, I think one of the most interesting questions about, certainly about AI art creation, is this point about collaboration. So it's not the neat distinction between Casey paints the picture and AI creates the picture. It's what happens if Casey uses the AI in his creation of the picture. And then, you know, what is the point past which we lose that interest? Or what is the point past which maybe we want to say that our evaluation of it changes?

I think these are much more complicated. And my assumption is a lot of what we're going to, at least for now, while we're relatively new, thinking about these things, a lot of our judgment is probably going to weigh on the level of which you have intended something. So if you think, I don't know, another analogy, think back to when composers in the 20th century, so as a niche example, we're experimenting with 12-tone music. So this is the idea that you kind of shake up all of the semitones and then you create a scale and you make music out of that. Think about the distinction of example one in which you get some randomizer to create that scale. But then the composer uses that.

scale and fully composes the piece themselves, right? And then example two, on which they just press a button and the whole thing is generated. So they're still pressing the button. Maybe they even say, I want the piece to be 12 minutes long. Or maybe they even say, I want it to express this thing. It seems to me like, you know, the work has gone in, the intention has gone in, the thinking, the reasons, all of this stuff. It's just so much more deep in example one. So the difference between the person having created the robot and clicking the button, not being there to experience it, not being there to feel it, not being there to be taken by the moment and think, oh my God, that's so beautiful. I want to share it with other people or I want to put it down in this moment. I just think there's a whole realm of stuff that is missing. Of course, the outputs might be identical.

But I think we care about that stuff as humans, whether we should or not is an interesting philosophical question. This is necessarily an endorsement of that as the, are we basically saying here that experience has an intrinsic value? I think experience is something special to living things. Yeah. I think that for conscious things in particular, right? Yeah. So then we go into this interesting question about consciousness. So one thing I'm particularly interested at the moment with these new technological advances.

And I'd say this both in terms of AI, but also the hope of finding non-human life in space. we have these new kind of comparatives. So we've thought, philosophers have thought for millennia about things like the relevance of consciousness or the relevance of sentience or the relevance of intelligence to being human. Many people have come up with theories around stuff like obligation that are contingent on our ideas at these things. At their heart, often there's a comparison with other things. So people might think it's okay to treat the human like this, but it's not okay to treat the animal like this because you can't get consent from the animal. or they might think it's okay to treat the animal like this, but not the human like this, because the human has greater sentience or intelligence.

We can argue all day about whether those theories are right or wrong, but all of a sudden we have these new kinds of comparison. So we have for the first time, at least I assume for the first time, I don't want to deny the possibility that maybe there were really great scientific achievements back in free human times or something like that we've just lost awareness of. But in the first time in our kind of awareness of human experience, we can have conversations with non-living things. This is astonishing to the philosopher because all of a sudden you get this new kind

of comparator. Similarly, if we find non-human life in space, we again get this new non-human comparator, which allows us to refine our notions of things like, you know, the relevance of consciousness to obligation or what it really means to be conscious. I think this is a very, very exciting time for philosophy, and it forces us to reconsider. So in the same way that now I think the field of aesthetics may well become more focused on who created the thing, because all of a sudden we have these non-human things that are capable of creating art with varying degrees of human involvement.

Similarly, we have these non-human things that seem to be displaying, again, at least at the outcome level, the kinds of properties that we have previously associated only with humans or only with living things. And here again, I would stress this difference between the outcome of something appearing to be and something actually being the case. So the classic example would be within these different theories of consciousness or notions or conceptions of consciousness, one of which is kind of functionalist account in which people say things like, look, the machine is brating these outputs that we think only conscious things can create, or which are the same as the things that conscious things create, therefore we should treat it as functionally conscious, and this

phenomenological sense in which it's not the outcome that matters or not solely, but it's, do you have this what it's likeness that you referred to? So I think it's the same with the art stuff. If the outcome sufficient, is it enough in terms of our value assignment to just compare the photograph taken by the robot and the photograph taken by the human? and say, look, they look exactly the same. Therefore, we should value them the same. And I think what I'm arguing is, it's just not as simple as that.

Yeah. But again, and I really think it goes then to what are you valuing? And I think that's this distinction here because the scientific output of this mission is not going to be much. And it wasn't sold. It's not a science mission. It's not why it happened. I think NASA maybe overplayed the science a little bit, particularly in the context of science being proposed to be cut in half. Like that's whitewashing, I think, some of the real destructive things that are happening to it.

And it's interesting that there's this ongoing attempt to layer on kind of this practical benefit of scientific knowledge, of X, Y, and Z. Even, you know, inspiration and STEM students and all the general, you know, the things that I try it out all the time and people try it out all the time. That stuff can be true, but also there can be something else, right? We don't have to give away the instrumental value to say that there's. something else or some other kinds of instrumental value. We can have it all. They fixate though on the instrumental value. And I think that's the, whereas I think what we're really getting at here is that, and what reacted to me was this, the non-instrumental value, which still is a value. And it's, I think, we're just not used in the society to talking about that very much and a very secular,

you know, quantized society of, of digital titans. But this idea that because there was an experience of individuals doing this because those individuals experience something and through those experiences, we can more easily share that experience, that it then becomes a most powerful symbol. None of these are the things that we measure normally. There is no, you know, big scientific revelation going to come out of this. That's not why, in a sense, we should do Artemis, I think, because science could be great add-on, but it's not never going to be the priority. And if you want to get the most science out of it, you would make.

hundreds of robots for that same, you know, the $100 billion is so we spent for that. Same for the technology. I mean, it's just, why aren't we able to just talk about, I'd say, from an institutional level? And you, as interesting, I heard this today to do brief tangent of this, there were multiple hearings about the NASA budget over the last week. Every member of Congress opened was saying, like, how much they were astonished or felt awe or excited by Artemis II. None of it was, I was so impressed by the scientific return of the images of Artemis 2. None of it was, I am, I counted all the engineering subcontracts awarded to these districts in Artemis 2. And wow, what an amazing, no, it was all the, they just, they talked about it from an

emotional experience experience level of something astonishing happened to them. But then it always goes back to the justification just dances around that. Are we just incapable of doing so? Like, why can't we just acknowledge there are different types of value to these things? Yeah, it's very hard, isn't it? I mean, part of it is just it's easier to justify money, spend on things that are quantifiable. People like numbers. They like big numbers. Things that are countable get counted, right? I mean, I think we talked about this last time and I talk about this all the time.

But this isn't really a very good answer, is it? I mean, I think this is an explanation of some kind. I think there's another point which you made very beautifully last time, which is also we're just not very good at talking about these things. we find sometimes these things. Some people find these things a little embarrassing. It's like talking about emotions more generally in public. Cringe would be, is that what the young people say? It's very funny.

I find the word cringe funny because, of course, the word cringe is very cringe. It's like, one of an old man like myself says it. Or me, one of these self-referential things. I think, for me, at least, because one of the problems we're talking about the station between instrumental value in the sense or things that, you know, are good because they bring about something else good. And intrinsic value, which we in short term kind of think

of those things are valuable in themselves. It's oftentimes discussions of intrinsic value shift and slip into discussions of instrumental value. I certainly find when I like to think about intrinsic value, I often think about it in terms of these basic human goods, which I think are not reducible to other things. So I think these things like knowledge and love and friendship, achievement, fulfillment,

these kinds of things, you can't reduce them down further. I mean, knowledge, you can say, somebody might say something like, look, education is valuable because it brings about knowledge and knowledge is valuable. What is the thing that knowledge brings about? I mean, knowledge brings about awareness or something,

but then that's just a kind of knowledge. And so I think we can say there are these things and these things are good for humans. But one thing, and I haven't really written about this before, but you just made me realize, of course, is that all of these things I just mentioned, knowledge, achievement, fulfillment, happiness, friendship, love, all the kinds of things that would not be good for non-self-aware things. Like, it wouldn't mean anything to say that, you know, love or friendship is good for the rock.

Right. And in which that's very special about us and it's morally important about us. This isn't to deny that there might be other things that have those properties too, but it is to say that it's important about us. those properties were also exhibited by the crew itself i mean the things that you just outlined it's like the the interplay of the crew itself i wonder is part of this here right because that was i think that the surprise maybe for most people to see i mean they let me they clearly have love for each other they worked well together they let you know they are friends they are but also they showed courage

and dedication and tenacity all of these kind of values that not just individually but interplay and the group dynamics of them is an ideal. This is a great point. And I think what we're getting on to is saying something like, look, space is a special source of some of these human values. That doesn't mean that you can't get these values in other places, but it means that maybe you can get them in a different way, or maybe you can get them into a new way or something like this,

or maybe you can get some particular combination of them, and that space is some special source in this sense. So it is just in a purely very simplistic sense in that the kind of knowledge, for instance, we get in space is knowledge that we can't get on Earth. Just as the experiential point, a human on Earth can't know what it's like for a human to be in space,

but also there are going to be facts about the universe that we can only learn by being in space. Now, again, we come back to the world, the robot could be in space, but let us take, again, coming back to my slight obsession with this, let us take an example of friendship. So you're right, one of the ways in which space activity

is a special source of friendship is that people can be friends in space. And that might allow them, for instance, to be particularly courageous to help their friends. You know, you can think of instances where people have suffered great risk in space for their colleagues. And sometimes when they could have saved themselves by doing something else. So those kinds of examples of showing friendship in special ways. Again, we might think of analogous instances on Earth. But a really exciting thing to me is the idea that we can potentially become friends with non-humans in space.

So people often talk about we need to know if the aliens are out there because then we can update our priors on their likelihood of attacking us and all these kind of clever theories. Something I think is really under discussed is the potential for a new source of friendship or even love. And I don't necessarily mean romantic love. There are going to be all kinds of interesting questions about, you know, the internet will be on that one.

Yeah, but I mean, yes, that's just like an expansion of this types of experiential values to new domains, basically, right? This is very, very exciting. So the philosopher can come along and say, hey, it's going to be instrumentally valuable for my theory of obligation. I'll try that out the next time I go to Congress.

Let's see it that. But also just this whole new source and set of things. I mean, this is one of the reasons I'm so excited about and not just in this kind of nerdy philosopher's sense of refining my conceptual framing and my apology and stuff. But the idea that there could be this new source of friendship, we could share, for instance, our knowledge with some other life form. We could share facts about our achievements. Imagine right.

I mean, sorry, I'm getting very romantic on this, but imagine that there's this alien life force out there and they're suffering from something that we solved. I mean, how astonishing the idea that we could share knowledge through our newfound friendship. I just think this is an astonishing sense of the kinds of opportunities. I just don't think people are really thinking about. And of course, all of this is contingent on the shimpy things, turning out to exist and all of that stuff. And I'm obsessed. And, you know, we shouldn't forget quite how many missions are ongoing at the moment, which are likely to bring us new information over the next decade or so.

I mean, I quickly wrote them down in preparations for this just because I was interested. You've got perseverance. You've got curiosity. You've got the orbiteres. You've got the Europa cipher. You've got the Jupiter icy moons explorer. You've got dragonfly. All of these are either up there or going up there.

Yeah. About World Observatory, Roman Space Telescope. That's right. We're living in the most astonishing moment. I mean, we already are for the AI stuff. I'm fully convinced all that. Although I also have, you know, by various concerns and all kinds of thoughts about it. But imagine, Casey, we are alive at this time when we might discover that it's true.

that not only are these kind of potential, you know, bioseignatures, but that there is, I mean, is this not just the most amazing time to be alive? There's just the speed of new information about what there is up there so far away. I mean, we took last time about the, in a sense of intrus we have that I think has been shared by humankind. Ever since humankind first you listed, the idea of going out there, looking up and seeing stars. I can't think of anything which signifies in this, again, to come back to you. point about this unifying sense, shared human experience, shared human intrigue, imagine that we're alive at the moment when we discover that something is looking back at us.

I just think this is the most astonishing moment and information is coming in every moment. And it is just an astonishing time to be alive. And that in itself, I think, is a, is a justification for investing in this, not just because of things like medical advances. I just think it's, I think it's very exciting. Yeah. And we are the kinds of things that can be excited. I agree. I mean,

I agree with you. And I think that's why I'm never too excited for people who want to go back into the past. Like, you know, not very pleasant for many reasons. I also like everyone take showers, you know, and base all the time.

It's great. But, I mean, again, to this point that I think the, that's the interesting tension that we live in right now. It's like simultaneously we are kind of doing all those, but proposing to get rid of a lot of those. Or we have like the small, I go back to,

I think the, the, Chropon's like small sold men should not attempt to play this piece. And as like small sold men should not, you know, attempt to lead our space program and have such a limited idea of what we can or can't do. But I mean, I think just to bring it back to this core of the values that we're deriving from this are primarily experiential, which I think is what made it so

almost shocking for people to follow it closely, that it is not the same. And I, this isn't my conversion into only. human space flight and colonized Mars type of a thing, but is I didn't, I think I didn't realize how much I missed. I don't know if I ever had it, but I somehow missed it. I realized I had something that I was missing that was filled by watching Artemis II. I want to reach one more perspective of this, and this is where I'm going to be in some pretty shaky philosophical grounds. You can correct me on this one. But the role of Artemis II itself, so again, Artemis II, going back to like, even within the scale of what is planned for Artemis, Artemis II is very constrained,

right. Its success was the fact that it would succeed. It had no goals beyond just going out and coming back safely, pretty much. Everything else was ancillary. It was a technology. It was a test of the systems. It was a test of the life support. It was, can we do this? I was wondering, like, Artemis II as symbol. And I know that there's obviously the role of symbol and the symbol as embodying itself, right? That it's not just a sign. is it, is it Tillick, right? This idea of the distinction between, you know, a representation of something physical and the symbol for something greater than itself. And Artemis II strikes me as a symbol for something greater than itself. Because it's not just Artemis 2 than Artemis 3.4. Artemis 2 is it's a return of humans going into deep space. It's a return of pushing outwards.

It's a return of somewhat daring missions and the significant uncertainty and unknown, right? we're not just circling anymore. I was reminded of, however long ago when I read Martin Buber and this idea of the, the I thou, right? That this is the experience of ourselves with almost, you know, it's that experiential aspect engaging with something far vaster than itself,

like on the level of the thou. That's where I see almost this expansion role of it, right? That it's not just Artemis II as we saw it. It's what it means beyond it. And if any of that makes sense or doesn't, please correct me on it. But something about that is what I'd like to hear your perspective on. No, I like that.

I think you put it very eloquently. I think there's a sense in which it represents something, doesn't it? It represents progress. Because even though we're doing something that we did before, this is what people like to say on the internet about Ultimals 2. It forces us to think, how have things changed since those times? So there are obvious ways in which, for instance, we've, as humankind's made progress. medical advances. I mean, the most obvious thing is, on average, humans across the world have

access to better goods and services. They live longer and outroach, healthier lives. So we've made that kind of progress. Then there's the stuff we talked about around technology that enables us to see it more clearly, to understand more about it. I think it forces us in being a moment, being some kind of defining moment, to think where are we at and where are we in comparison to that? Because, of course, there are also some kind of sad comparisons back during the polar era, you know, it was the time Vietnam War and these other kinds of crises for humanity. And we, you know, we find ourselves suffering some of those similar experiences. Indeed, I think it's under-discussed the relevance of space tech to militarism.

I see all the defense dudes talking about this all the time. And I see my kind of space defense friends saying, hey, the defense dudes, the rest of them are finally catching up and understanding this. But I don't really see more general policy people talking about this. In fact, I think if you asked a general policy, this is not. I have no differentity reports and stuff. I'm not talking about them. They're all brilliant and they understand space because I go on about them and stuff.

But if you pick the average policy pattern in D.C. for instance, or in London, and you said, hey, tell me some things I should think about around no war at the moment. My guess is, talking about space is what going to come at like number 30, if at all. Whereas, I mean, there are just all of these implications of the way in which satellite technology is used, but also potentials for, I saw all kinds of people making these arguments around, look, they're shifting to using this kind of tech because it's going to enable them to do these kinds of things. And I don't think there's sufficient talk about that. So I think there's a sense in which this symbolic moment forces us to compare where we are with where we were.

Think about the ways in which we've progressed, the ways in which we haven't. I also think there's a more, there's another kind of negative take on this, though, which is that symbols can be instrumentalized, to use your word, themselves, right? So a symbol can be used, for instance, it has political aliens. The symbol of sending people to the moon can represent all kinds of things and different people, and it can be used to represent a sense of domination, for instance, a sense of nationalism. We know that there have been political misages of space programs since space programs first came into existence. So there's a risk to reducing something down to a symbol.

There's value. I'd say more than a risk. I mean, that's kind of the explanation. Yeah. Value proposition being put forward by a lot in the policy sphere, right? That this is a, this is a way to beat China or to a, to a sort of a symbolic dominance or, probably in Trump's perspective, space dominance. That's right. Which is, to me, cheapens it, but it's a, it's a version of that symbolic statement, right? It's the going back to your, your peacock feathers or, you know, whatever, kind of a, some people are going to say, hey, that's the trade law. The only way you're going to

get the taxpayer to buy in and by saying, there's this existential crisis or there's this need to, you know, this is the whole narrative or part of the narrative anyway around the Apollo stuff. I don't think the tradeoff is a good way to look at it, but I understand why people do. I think there are a lot of costs which come with that framing. Yeah. How do you evaluate cost and value broadly for things that are harder to measure? Like when you look at kind of what is a public good and I mean, you're kind of classical, liberal kind of philosophical perspective, I would assume generally isn't super excited about a large government program marshalling taxpayer resources for something that is like makes us feel sublime.

Or maybe it is. But I mean like that how do you kind of measure and judge what is where that prioritization goes? Or maybe maybe more a better way to talk about this would be what is the metric and what type of way should we approach this as a society that still I think would. evaluate, you know, support the individual, right, and the experience of the individual and the individual rights through this almost required large group effort to do something pretty wild. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I'll come back to one thing I said earlier, which is I am interested in this idea of, I guess, the way in which different kinds of experiences

or different kinds of progress also can further human goods. So I think there's a sense in which you can say, human kind derives value from the space program because in an innate, the advancement of knowledge or something like that. So I think there's that kind of sense, which comes back to some of our discussion about the intrinsic value. But the human one does not advance knowledge, right? That's the... That's right, because we have all of these other goods that we can depend upon, too.

And I'm kind of a pluralist about human value in this sense. I'm not somebody who thinks the only thing that is good for humans is happiness and therefore you maximized the happiness. And to be fair, you could be a monist about value and think that happiness is the only important thing without being a maximized. But I'm neither a hedonist in the monistic sense, nor am I a utilitarian. I don't think that the good things should be maximised. I don't think it's just one good thing.

So I have a pluralistic conception, which just gives me more to be able to work on with that. But the other little move I like to make is something like this. Usually when we're thinking about state like taxpayer spend, there are a couple of reasons why we think taxpayer spend needs to be well justified. So one is because it's being done on behalf of the taxpayer and it's not just their money. It's representing them in some way. So if my dollars or my pounds go towards militarism, it's not just that money's been taken out of my pocket.

It's something's being done on my behalf. This comes back to my point around state actors having certain obligations. But there is also this sense in terms of opportunity costs. So the dollar spent on a space program is a dollar that could have been spent on, you know, healthcare or education. Or if those things are already adequately well provided, then a dollar back in my pocket in terms of the, you know, tax decrease. So this always is a problem,

justifying taxpayer spend, this problem of opportunity cost. Now, there is a way we can get around it, though, and this comes back to something you said about rights. So if it is the case that you think that the public have the right to have access to something, then that means that nothing has to be provided as long as it can be provided. It doesn't, you can kind of skirt over the opportunity cost. So if you're saying, look, kids have a right to go to school. We need to pay for the schools.

Then it's not really like, hey, you can use the argument that the money on the schools could have been spent on healthcare or on the space program. No, money just has to be spent on that thing. So the thing we really want to do is those of us who are interested in this kind of justification, who care about stuff like taxpayers' spend, who care about stuff like justifying state decisions, but also love the space stuff and recognizing the truth of the matter is that nobody's going into space without a lot of taxpayer money, broadly American taxpayer money, but also taxpayer money across the rest of the world because the money that funds education

that enables people to be scientific inquiry that enables people, people in America to be able, you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah. So not least because of huge permanent contracts, it is still the case. Nobody's going into space without a lot of tax-based spend. So how am I going to justify that, bearing in mind all of my other concerns? Well, I can come up with these rights-based arguments. I can say things like maybe we have the right to know about stuff in space.

That's quite a hard argument to make, but you get somewhere down the line. I'm quite interested in the moment of thinking about arguments around where you kind of conjoined the rights-based argument and knowledge-based arguments. So I have an argument I'm working on at the moment in a paper that I wrote, which I'm revisiting, where I argue something like, there might be the right for people to have the opportunity to know certain kinds of art objects. So imagine people don't spend money in opera tickets, therefore opera dies out in the country. And you want to say people who can only really experience opera and come to know opera by attending opera performances. You have to make that argument. I can make that argument. You might then say,

look, it's a really important facet of being a human to experience this great thing of human achievement, which is the form of opera. It tells us something about what is to be human. It also tells us something about, I don't know, special things in music, like kinds of symmetries or relations between notes. You can come up with all of these kinds of arguments. And then you can say, you would be denying something that they have a right to if they didn't have a chance to opportunity or the opportunity to know it. I think you could make a similar kind of argument justifying spend on space. It's going to be probably hard. These arguments are hard arguments to make.

But I think it's something that classical liberals who believe in rights should have in their back pocket, which enables you to evade the opportunity cost problem because you say, look, we just require this spending. And of course, you can then say, well, the dream, of course, is that the taxpayer doesn't have to put up the money. instead it comes through the money comes to profits from you know private space company who we investing et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera and the market rides eventually or whatever however you want to have passion out we know we're not at that stage yet the space exploration but i think there are these kinds of arguments they're hard arguments to make but i think that underutilized i like that way of thinking about it i like the right of the right to know or maybe the right to experience something

or at least the right to have the opportunity to know or the opportunity to experience. Not least because I'm a kind of internalist about knowledge, but yeah. Rebecca Lowe, I've taken a lot of your time today. Is there any final thoughts on Artemis II in value that you'd like us to make sure we touch on before we go? One final thing I would say is I was rethinking about this nice piece of yours with James Schwartz, the ethical obligation to plan for science. Yeah. In the age of competitive space exploration, which I read a while ago,

And I think about this often and a few things you've said in this discussion around maybe the limited scientific value of this particular mission and also the wider sense in which maybe planetary science is not being sufficiently well supported, argued for, funded, whatever the concerns are. You made these very nice points in this piece around the kind of competing kinds of space activities and the cost potentially to scientific knowledge. So, for instance, it's a certain kind of, I don't know, for instance, knowledge that you can only get by looking at the surface of one of Saturn's moons, but before the scientists get there, the people have gone and built their missions base in order to fire missiles. You have an argument which isn't just, hey, we need to justify having the missile base. It's also maybe there was a one-time opportunity to learn stuff. I think about this often, and I feel it isn't discussed sufficiently. And I think also there may be a risk. You use the word whitewashing.

There may be a risk that because you have this high profile thing that on some level is being justified in terms of the scientific advancement. But the scientific advancement is relatively limited. That there's a real risk there that this gets missed. And is somebody who's very, very excited about the kind of knowledge we can derive from space exploration. I feel it's something that we should really take very seriously. In a sense that there's a value of the pristine environment before it is. disturbed and particularly given that becomes a much more bigger ethical question too if there's any potential for

biological aspects of it as well. Not a winning argument in face of billions of dollars and perceived resource allocation extraction at seemingly. I agree to I think it's a good idea too. I mean it's one of those things where I think we see space as not constrained by limits. It's unlimited resources right and so when you have unlimited limited anything, the value of it is effectively zero, right? But the whole point is that it's not unlimited.

There's a lot of space and space, but most of that we don't care about. There's also a particularity point. I sometimes see people making was also around when they kind of perceive that there might just become an end to scarcity because of, for instance, the advantages of AI technology. They say things like, we're just going to have a limited resource. But in a world in which even if you had a limited resources, we'd still attach value to particular things. So let's imagine that there's no limit on how many cakes that we can eat because cakes become so cheap or, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You pass it out however you want. I want that particular cake with my granny baked it. Similarly, there may be, let's imagine there are infinite planets, but it's that particular planet that holds that particular kind of life with those particular living things. So particularity doesn't shift out the window just because you suddenly have a lack of a wee. even zero scarcity. This is just a, this is just bad philosophical, conceptual, like thinking, I think. I've been very influenced by the book, This Life by Martin Heglund, which came out a few, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. And this whole argument was meaning only is derived from scarcity, whether it's, you know, your own existence, which is limited, or any physical thing that you have an intake. Maybe error would be the

exception to that. And like, I think like that's, but the value of, you know, your life has no value if you're immortal, basically, right? Like, there's nothing driving you to do anything now versus later because no time has no meaning to you. Your loved ones are valuable to you because your time with them is limited and one day you won't be there. They won't be there and so forth. You can extend that beyond that. And I think there's a lot to that in terms of how you assert value. And I get the same kind of hesitations around infinite resources. It's just kind of asserted without getting there. But even then if you have infinite resources, they don't necessarily mean anything then.

And I think you have to then, I see what you're saying. You're basically like, you're asserting too big of an umbrella. What do you mean? But the particularity of the one is the one that's going to give you value. And then because then it's limited again, right? Because now you have a finite amount of it. I also think you could apply my particularity argument to the human who exists forever, by the way, though.

So I think even if you did. forever. I think you'd still have value as you, quite you, because you're the only you. It would be very hard to think about how you would govern your life and your relationships if you knew you're going to live forever. I don't think that that would mean that you didn't have objective values in particular person, particularly living things, particular, inner properties like consciousness. But I think it would be very hard to work out how you go about doing anything particularly lasting. So if you're going to live forever, suddenly the idea of, for instance, getting married means something quite different.

If you're going to live forever, a sudden idea of studying something, planning something becomes quite complicated. I mean, again, I'm just an optimist for all things. I want to live forever because I want to continue learning things. I want to continue experiencing things. I do think, nonetheless, that if you did live forever, you probably suffer quite often from us kind of dread from a kind of just being entirely flummoxed about how to assess. things out of the line value.

Prioritization seems like it'd be really difficult. Prioritization, that's right. And we gain a lot from focusing hard on things, from prioritizing. And if you just had endless time, that said, my assumption is that if we do get to live forever, it won't be because biological death disappears. It'll just be because we find ways to continue generating human tissues and cells and things. You could probably still die by getting run over by the bus.

There is another interesting philosophical sense, though, in which, and I, also have a lot of time for this idea that maybe the mind assists after bodily death. I actually think this is something we should all do a much better job but ensuring us helps against. I read your chilling essay about that once and it stuck with me. I mean, I thought it was a very positive essay, but yes, the idea that, you know, because it's possible that we might persist forever as disembodied minds, therefore we should be spending much more time trying to make ourselves interesting in order such that we can

amuse ourselves for identity. But it is hard to think about, and again, it tests some of our notions around these things like scarcity to think about how different it would be if we didn't have these expectations around

dying, around aging, around certain things happening in certain times. Some of those norms and expectations are extremely limiting. I mean, they're obviously all just in the baseline sense of how you're going to die. But also these kinds of social norms we have around like, you do your education when you're young. That's a terrible social law. I mean, it has some advantages,

but it also has massive disadvantages. So I'm quite excited at a poster and thinking about the ways in which if new technology can enable new possibilities, we have to rethink some of the things that can strain us. Rebecca Lowe, thank you so much for your input and thoughts on the bigger meaning of all of this. I'm sure we will talk again on the space policy edition. I love that. Thanks again. We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy. edition of Planetary Radio. But we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and the planetary society by leaving a review and rating

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