Tech Won't Save Us - Demystifying the Billionaire Space Race

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

Paris Marx takes a solo episode to discuss the billionaire space race. Specifically, how billionaires are selling grand futures of space travel as a PR scheme to get huge public contracts that will allow them to control the infrastructure of space.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about the billionaire space race, and it was translated into German, Italian, and Turkish.New Mexico’s $220-million Spaceport America that’s used by Virgin Galactic is a joke.SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has been way overhyped.If we went to Mars, we would get cancer.Adam Mann had a great essay on how we should think about Mars, and whether it’s “ours.”Elon Musk says we can be indentured servants on Mars, and people will die.Paris has written about Jeff Bezos’ space colonies, and compared them to Blade Runner and The Expanse.Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO to take on the role of Executive Chairman.Ursula K. Le Guin argues science fiction isn’t about the future, nor is it predictive.Amazon’s emissions rose 19% in 2020 and it’s helping Big Oil.Paris wrote about the real climate future billionaires are creating.Support the show

You obviously have grander space ambitions than going to the edge of it. Did this moment motivate you to push deeper into the cosmos? Hell yes. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is, well, it's me. I was debating it for a few days, but after watching the coverage of Jeff Bezos' launch into space on the morning of July 20th, I decided I want to take this time, I want to take an episode of the podcast to really dig into these billionaires' visions of space, what's wrong with them, and why we should really be concerned about the project that I think they are trying to move forward. You know, obviously, you'll know it's very uncommon for me to kind of take an episode of the podcast for myself. I've never really done it before other than to celebrate the first birthday of the podcast. But I thought if there's ever a time to do it,

now is the time. Because I wrote an article about this space launch, about what the billionaires are trying to do in space. And I still felt like I didn't get it all out. I wasn't able to fully dig into it, even though it was a fairly long article. It was very well received. It was written for Tribune, republished in Jacobin, translated into German, Italian, Turkish. You know, hopefully there will be more that will come. But after seeing how the media was covering this event and how they were just buying into these narratives that were being put forward by Jeff Bezos, especially the cable media. I think like the published media was not as bad, though I guess we'll see. You know, obviously you got

more critical perspectives online, but I feel like the people who were most excited about this, other than Jeff Bezos himself, were the media pundits and the media anchors who were doing the work of kind of selling this ideology, of selling this idea to the public. And I think it's a public that largely is ambivalent to it, doesn't really care about it, or is even actively hostile to it. I think much more so than the media kind of has led on. So that's why I want to dig into this further. You might have listened to my earlier episode back in March with Manu Sadia, the author of Trachonomics, about kind of the ideology behind this modern billionaire space race, you know, the move to colonize space and

how they think about and frame what they want to do in space. And I think that is a really good conversation if you want more on this. But in this episode, I want to go specifically into the particular visions that are being put forward and the kind of material consequences of those visions that we need to be really concerned about because these people are obviously incredibly powerful and have the ability to kind of shape public mood, public perception, to get their ideas in the heads of like millions of people very easily, not just because they have so much money and power, but because the media will give them this uncritical access, will launder

whatever they want them to. They're really like the stenographers for the billionaires, especially like cable news and things like that. But we desperately need to challenge these ideas if we're ever going to have a more positive future. So before we really get into it, let me just say this podcast exists because listeners support the work that I do. Every episode is free for everybody. If you are liking the podcast, if you like this episode, please consider going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. And so my goal in this episode is kind of to start with the recent events around this billionaire space race, what has been kind of being said about it, then to move

into the visions that these billionaires have been putting forward for what they think life and space would be like in their kind of ideal scenario that they want us to believe is real, is achievable. And then finally, to get into this actual launch, Jeff Bezos' actual launch, how it was reported, and the kind of things that he said afterward that I think are important for us to pay attention to. So this recent chapter in the billionaire space race started when Jeff Bezos said that he was going to take a trip to space on July 20th. He was going to be the first billionaire to actually go into space, even though there are questions about whether the height that they went is

actually considered space. We'll leave that to the side for now. And then as we know, Richard Branson jumped in and said, oh, I'm going to beat Jeff Bezos. I'm going to get the space first because Richard Branson has his own space company, Virgin Galactic. And so he set his launch date for July 11th. And he did that launch. He got all of his wonderful press afterward. And I think the thing to understand about Richard Branson is that he's basically an attention whore. If you've ever paid attention to him, he's always trying to come up with some kind of marketing stunt, some kind of publicity trick to get the media to cover his businesses and what he's up to, his grand ideas, whatever. And this was no different. When we actually talk about the billionaire space race, I think we're mainly talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

So I just want to briefly get Branson out of the way, and then we can kind of ignore him, because I don't think he's actually very important in this larger discussion. Branson's goal is really all about space tourism. That is kind of his focus. And he wants us to believe that going to space is going to be this thing that anyone can do in the future, right? It's for rich people now, but give it a few years, let the technology progress, let this become more common. And all of a sudden, all of us will be able to get a relatively cheap ticket to go up into zero gravity for a little while and come back down. You know, it's like an amusement park ride in a sense. But I think there are really serious reasons to doubt that

and to think that this is just another example of these billionaires kind of putting out this grand idea that they will never actually achieve. Maybe it will just become like a business for really rich people to occasionally go up into zero gravity, but how long does that really last? Especially for something like Branson's that is really oriented toward tourism and not toward anything kind of larger beyond that. So I'm very skeptical, even though Branson has received public subsidies in the form of the space port, I guess you could call it, in New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic will presumably be operating from. But it's really a joke, right? And I feel like even when you go back and look at the clips

of Richard Branson kind of giving his little speech when he came down from space, and you know, that's in scare quotes, but it seemed like even he didn't believe like the bullshit he was saying about how space is going to be for everyone in the future. So the mission statement that I wrote inside my spacesuit was to turn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren who are here, for your grandchildren and for many people who are alive today, for everybody. And having flown to space, I can see even more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the space line for Earth. We're here to make space more accessible to all, and we want to turn the next generation of dreamers into the astronauts of today and tomorrow. I saw someone in the UK say like Richard Branson really wants us to believe that a ticket to space is going to be affordable in the future, but he can't even provide an affordable train ride from

like London to Liverpool or wherever his trains operate in the UK because Virgin is also a train operator in the United Kingdom and their services are notoriously really bad and really expensive. But oh yeah, he's definitely going to provide an affordable and reliable space service. Give me a break. So I think that's really all that needs to be said about Richard Branson. He's like a sideshow in this. He just wants the attention. I'm incredibly skeptical that Virgin Galactic ever gets really far. I don't think it's going to be this kind of service that is really affordable for people to go up in. It's just not going to happen. So I think the main two people that we

then need to be focused on are Musk and Bezos. And so I want to go through their respective visions for space, what they say that life in space should be like, because there are disagreements there. You know, people who pay attention to this like to note that in 2004, they had this meeting and there were disagreements. And Elon Musk called Jeff Bezos's ideas for space dumb. And so they've had this rivalry ever since. But I think we can very easily see this rivalry as being more of like a PR stunt or a fun little game for these incredibly rich people. But ultimately, they're working toward the same goal, especially in the near to medium term. And so Musk's vision of space, as I'm sure

that we have all heard before, but I'll just repeat it briefly, is that humanity should become a multi-planetary species. We cannot simply stay on Earth because there might be an extinction event and then our whole species is wiped out and none of us are surviving anywhere else. So we need to spread ourselves to other celestial bodies so that if something ever happens on Earth, like the climate apocalypse that people like Musk are fueling, then there's kind of like a backup colony that will still survive. And like, in reality, if Earth got wiped out, that colony would not survive, like those people would all die. But okay, whatever. I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever,

and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, which I hope you would agree that is the right way to go. Yes? That's what we want.

Yeah. So his big idea in particular is that we colonize Mars. You know, obviously this is the thing he talks about all the time. I believe his initial timeline for when he was going to send a rocket to Mars has already passed. And now he has a new deadline set. You know, it's like with everything else with Elon Musk, self-driving cars are going to be here in a few more years. They're always going to be a few more years away. But don't worry, they're coming. They're seriously coming, except they're never coming. And it's possible that NASA might one day give it all the money it needs to go to Mars, but that still won't be the beginning of a colony

or anything serious like that. Okay, so I'm getting sidetracked. But that's just to say that Musk's vision is about colonization. And in particular, it's about colonization on Mars or the moon. It's on these giant space rocks, essentially. And even though these places are not habitable at all, Musk still wants people to believe that it's something that's seriously achievable in the relatively near term that we would colonize these inhospitable space rocks. Except anyone who is informed about space can seriously tell you that if we tried to settle Mars, most people would probably die of cancer from the radiation. If we did live there, we would probably have to live deep underground and never often see

the surface of the planet or the sun. That would not be very great. We obviously wouldn't be able to breathe the air for probably hundreds of years if terraforming was even possible in that time. Like it really is not the kind of exciting thing that Musk tries to present it to be. It would actually really suck. And I think if people actually did go and settle there, they would get really tired with it really fast if, you know, as I said, they didn't get sick and die anyway. So it's a ridiculous vision, but it is one that a lot of people that Musk's cult has really kind of grabbed onto and really kind of believes and, you know, they'll wear these shirts that say Occupy Mars and things like this,

and they seriously believe that we should go colonize this planet, right? And Musk in particular had some really concerning things to say about this. He said a lot of wild things about the government structure, but I think we can obviously see that it would be a way to escape the regulations and governments of Earth and have a lot of power for himself on this planet that is outside of it. He's talked about how a ticket will be quite expensive, like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, I believe, but it's okay because it will be accessible to everyone and they will just have to become indentured servants and work off their debts once they arrive in Mars, which sounds really great. And then Musk has also been really open about the fact that people are

going to die in achieving his vision. If we actually go and try to colonize Mars, people will die in trying to achieve that. And he's okay with that because he won't be one of those people. In contrast though, Jeff Bezos' vision is a little bit different. What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources? The answer is incredibly simple, rationing. That's the path that we would be on. And that path does not lead, it would lead for the first time

to where your grandchildren and their grandchildren would have worse lives than you. That's a bad path. There's good news. The good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources. So, we get to choose. Do we want stasis and rationing? Or do we want dynamism and growth?

This is an easy choice. We know what we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice. We know what we want. We just have to get busy. If we're out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we'd have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.

What could this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Well, it's very interesting. Somebody named Jerry O'Neill, a physics professor, looked at this question very carefully, and he asked a very precise question that nobody had ever asked before. And it was, is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system? And he and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising, for them, counterintuitive answer. No. There is still this element of colonization, but instead of living like on the surface of a planet, Jeff Bezos wants us to live in floating space colonies that would essentially be in orbit around the planet or within the vicinity of Earth. And these ideas that Bezos promotes are not unique

at all, but rather they come from one of his old university professors. So back in the 1970s, Gerard O'Neill was writing about what he called the O'Neill cylinders. And they would be these kind of like circular space settlements that, you know, would be around Earth in the vicinity of Earth where we would move. And they would be these kind of like perfect habitats with nature in them and all these sorts of things. If you look at the concepts that Bezos has released, like you'll see that they have ideas for like mountains within these space colonies, like it's trying to recreate the biomes of Earth in space and getting us to all leave the planet and live in these colonies because we need to preserve Earth because we're destroying it, which is just incredibly wild. And like, you know, I think we'll come back to the environmental side of this. But Jeff Bezos says that creating these colonies will allow us

to expand the human population to a trillion people. And he talks about this in the sense of that will allow us to create more Einsteins and more Mozarts and, you know, other geniuses, right? Because obviously genius and talent is this incredibly rare thing in his view. I don't actually believe that. But when you actually dig into it, Bezos talks very little about workers. He says that there's going to be a trillion people, but where are all those trillion people going to be? What are they going to be doing in space? He only really talks about those geniuses. And you can see that he only really thinks about it from the perspective of a billionaire, of someone who is incredibly rich. But I think we can easily imagine that if this future was ever achieved, and I'm incredibly skeptical that even in hundreds of years, we would not be doing something like this.

But where are the workers, right? Where are the workers in this vision? They're silent. And I think we can see that thinking about someone like Jeff Bezos, whose entire wealth is built on the backs of exploited workers, that workers would still be being exploited in this future that he imagines. You know, instead of being on the beautiful surfaces of these space colonies with all these natural features created to look like Earth, I think they would, you know, be in the depths of those colonies, working away and toiling away to keep them operating, serving the rich people just as they do down on Earth. If you've ever seen the film Elysium, it kind of shows rich people that live up in a space colony, and then everyone else,

the poor, the working class, living down on a kind of climate-ravaged Earth, right? But the difference in Bezos' vision is that we would all be up in those colonies, and hardly any of us would still be on the surface of the planet because we would be trying to preserve it in this kind of museum-like form. And we would occasionally take trips down to planet Earth to visit our old home, then go back into the space colonies so we don't be spoil it. Again, I think like Musk's vision, you can see just how unachievable, how ridiculous this is, especially because if you think about the timelines that would be involved, we're talking about many hundreds of years, at least, until something like this would be seriously realistic. Yet, because of the climate crisis, we need to radically

alter how we live in the next decade or two if we're not going to see like runaway warming billions of people having to migrate cities being inundated with seawater but instead these like wild visions of space saving us are the things that are being floated by these billionaires and that's why it's really concerning that they're getting all this attention from the media and that they're being allowed to spread these ideas to the world because they are not achievable and they're just distracting us from like the very serious problems that we actually need to be addressing in the here and now while these wealthy people are also hoarding the resources that will be necessary to address those problems. But that's not the end of it, right? Because it's not just about these grand visions, okay? The grand visions are a lie. They're a marketing scheme. They're PR to get us to buy into those visions, to get us the dream that like if we've ever watched Star Trek or read some science fiction that we really liked, that that kind of future is actually going to happen. And, you know, one of the interesting things is always that science fiction is not about prediction in most senses, right? Science fiction, as, you know,

a lot of science fiction authors tell it, and a lot of people who research science fiction tell it, is that those stories are actually about dealing with things that are happening in the present time and just setting them in a future so that we can get some distance from them and we can explore them in a different way. And instead, you know, these billionaires and these people who get deluded by these visions lose that kind of connection, right? And just think that, oh, we should be striving for these technologies. And, you know, the ideas of those technologies obviously influence the way that we think about the future, the way that we design things, the way that things progress, because they set those ideas into the public psyche and into the psyche of

people who are making these decisions. But that doesn't mean that that's what the future is going to look like or has to look like. And so this is where we turn to what these space billionaires are actually doing, right? So while they are promoting these grand visions, what is the actual purpose of that? What are they doing materially in the here and now that is benefiting them? Because the idea of colonizing Mars or building space colonies that a trillion people are going to live in are obviously not something that's going to happen in the next 10 years. So what are they doing materially? What is the business case here? And that is that Elon Musk's company SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are essentially trying to become like

aerospace companies and military contractors. They are in fierce competition to get contracts from NASA, from the U.S. Department of Defense, from the Federal Communications Commission even. And these contracts are worth millions, if not more than a billion dollars. So these are massive contracts. And even though the narrative around these private space companies is that it's all about entrepreneurialism and these billionaires, you know, funding private companies that are able to do all this innovation on their own, that isn't true. Yes, there is an aspect of it. And I think Bezos's in particular gets more money and at least in the early years wasn't as

reliant on public contracts. But a 2019 report from an organization called Space Angels estimated that $7.2 billion had been handed out to the commercial space industry since the year 2000. And it particularly singled out SpaceX as a company that was reliant on public contracts to get off the ground in the early days that probably would not have survived if it wasn't for NASA contracts. And the funny thing is that for all the times that Musk is like positioned as this entrepreneur, the self-made guy, it was the same with Tesla. Tesla likely would not be around today if it wasn't for the bailout under the Obama administration that gave a ton of money to Tesla so it could

continue operating. You know, the Obama administration and the US federal government are often nailed for that program because they funded a solar company called Solyndra that failed. But that same program funded Tesla. And I think a lot of those people wouldn't say the same thing about Tesla and wouldn't be so critical of it, even though I think there are serious problems with that company too. So just to give you an example, in recent years, SpaceX has won a contract for $149 million from the Pentagon to build missile tracking satellites. It won two more contracts worth $160 million to use its Falcon 9 rockets for launches. It also won an initial contract for the Space Force that was worth

$316 million. But that means that the Space Force will likely continue relying on SpaceX, so that contract will be worth much more in the future as those launches continue. And it also won $900 million in subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission to provide rural broadband with its Starlink satellites, satellites that are way overhyped, like the internet service from that. I'll include a link in the show notes, but like it's super overhyped and doesn't actually provide the kind of service that it's often been positioned to provide in the media. And, you know, one of the biggest ones that happened recently was when SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to build a moon lander for NASA, and Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin immediately challenged it because they wanted that contract as well. And that almost led

to a bill being passed in the United States Congress that would have given an additional $10 billion to NASA, in part so it could give a second contract to Blue Origin. So this is what these companies are really doing. They are not kind of building a road to space. They are not trying to make space accessible to everybody. They are not trying to colonize the moon or Mars or build massive space colonies. They are trying to win major public contracts to essentially control the infrastructure of space. They want to make the rockets.

They want to control the infrastructure of space. They want to make the rockets. They want to control the launches. They want to increasingly control the satellites, as we see with the Starlink service, and Amazon is building its own kind of alternative satellite internet service. And Elon Musk even has a contract to develop missiles for the U.S. Department of Defense. And it was really interesting, as I was kind of digging into this, we obviously see that with Bezos's launch, there was this big kind of media spectacle. And every time that SpaceX does a launch, there's a video out there and the SpaceX fans are all into it. Sometimes it makes it into the media. But what Elon Musk does not tweet about or does not make a big deal about is when it wins these big military contracts, because that could be potentially controversial

and it isn't really part of the image that he's trying to sell of this kind of future that really escapes governments in some way and is all about like private companies and entrepreneurialism. But really it's heavily reliant on public money and working with the Department of Defense, NASA, and these other organizations. So why then did Bezos do his big launch? If this isn't really about making space for everyone, which I would say it is not, even though Bezos also talks a bit about tourism and selling tickets so people can go up, I would argue that that's just an attraction, right? It's a PR exercise, it's marketing to get people to buy into the idea that billionaires and private companies should control these infrastructures for their personal benefit. And the idea is that

they're trying to sell this grander future to people, but they're actually just trying to help themselves as, you know, a billionaire and a capitalist will always do. And in particular, Bezos is doing this right now because Blue Origin seems to be having a more difficult time winning these contracts than SpaceX. And we can see that with the Moonlander contract, where SpaceX got it and Blue Origin tried to challenge it because it wanted that contract. And the argument is that it's partially because SpaceX has a much bigger public profile. Obviously, people know who Elon Musk is, even though he's someone who works his employees to the bone, underpays them, fights their unions, sells products that he misrepresents to people

that causes them to die in car accidents. He still generally has a positive reputation among the public, and he also has that reputation among politicians and lawmakers. And SpaceX has also been much more public about its launches and trying to get people to buy into the vision that Elon Musk sells. So it's been more successful in winning these NASA and military contracts. And so since Blue Origin wants in on that, and Bezos has stepped down from his position as CEO of Amazon, he's now executive chairman, he wants to put more time into the space business. And so part of that is raising the profile of the company, which this launch obviously did, so that it can hopefully

get more of these contracts and compete against SpaceX in controlling these important space infrastructures before SpaceX is able to kind of like quasi monopolize them. Obviously, there are more companies kind of competing in this sector, but the traditional companies that are involved in this are being concerned about the way that SpaceX in particular, but Blue Origin as well, are taking their contracts and promoting this alternative vision of how to approach space. I would say that the Bezos launch was incredibly effective at achieving what Bezos wanted it to. I was just switching through a couple of US channels, ABC News and CBS News, and they were

obviously covering it live for a number of hours. And you know, their anchors were effusive. Like, it was all positive, and they were repeating the lines that Bezos has been using that he wants to drill into people's heads. And not just him, like, you know, the whole kind of billionaire space race industry, I would say, the private space industry. They were repeating these talking points and kind of normalizing what was actually going on there. And I was told when I commented on this that, you know, the other networks were doing this as well, but it wasn't just in the United States, that networks in other countries were also running this live stream of the event, were commenting on

it, had guests on to comment on it. It was a spectacle, right? And it was being linked back to the earlier U.S. launches, the Apollo program, the space shuttle, and trying to tap into that history to make a relationship with that history, because that was something that really excited not just Americans, but a lot of people around the world. And so these billionaires and the people involved in the private space industry want their space efforts to be seen in the same way. And the news stations and the anchors were trying really hard to help them to do that. They operate on spectacle as well. They want to get eyeballs in. And so they need to make a big deal of everything that happens, whether it's a tragedy or whether it's a positive event. They need to take it to the extreme to keep people engaged.

And so naturally, they did it with this as well. They were even like explicitly saying that people are critical of this, but like, why are they critical? This is such a positive thing. We need this. We need to go to space. Like all of these just absolutely wild narratives that I think most of the public doesn't even buy into. Charlie, why should normal people want to go into space? You know, there's so much tsk tsk about the billionaires who are doing this vanity project. Could you really explain why this is so important? You touched on it briefly with Nora. This is so much bigger than what I think people really realize what is happening here. It really is, Gail. And normal people should want to go in space for a number of reasons. But the event was very successful in getting Blue Origin into people's minds,

in helping to redefine Jeff Bezos to a lot of people, not just as the evil Amazon chairman who is oppressing his workers, paying them very little, subjecting them to horrible working conditions. No, he's the exciting billionaire who is bringing people to space. And I'm sure that this is just the beginning of a rehabilitation campaign for him. But I also want to discuss the things that he said in the aftermath of the launch, when he got back on the ground and was like doing his kind of reflection interviews to like say how great it was that he was in space.

And the first one of these, which I'm sure you've all heard, is that he made a specific thanks to Amazon workers and Amazon customers. And I'll play that. And then I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. So the egregious thing here is that Bezos is kind of like acknowledging this criticism, this thing that most people on the left would realize,

and that's that the vast wealth, the $200 billion that he has accumulated comes from underpaying, pressuring, and mistreating those workers at Amazon. He knows it. He acknowledges it. It's Amazon workers that created the value that made Amazon one of the most valuable companies in the world, but also Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. And now he's explicitly saying that after all of the abuse, after forcing workers to pee in bottles, after forcing them to faint in overheated warehouses, in subjecting them to high targets that caused them to have repetitive stress injuries, to hurt their bodies in other ways, to not accommodate people so women had miscarriages, to not pay attention to safety so

people were injured and people even died. That after all that, what they suffered for and what they sacrificed for was so this billionaire could go to space, could achieve his like childhood fantasy, and also to set up this business where he's trying to take control of this key infrastructure of the future. It is absolutely wild. And I seriously hope that people latch onto this in the days and weeks and months to come. Not just like in the media to show who he really is, though obviously I'm holding out no hopes on that front, but also the workers. You know, he just acknowledged that he's stolen like $200 billion in wealth from workers. How can that not change the calculus? How can that not, you know, hopefully wake more people up to what is actually

going on here? That vast wealth should obviously be going to creating a better world for the people who created it, to addressing the climate crisis, to addressing inequality, to lessening inequality, to addressing the housing crisis, the food crises, all of these things. But instead, they're funding this billionaire space vision and space company. It really turns your stomach. But that's not the end of it, right? Because when he came back down to Earth, he also played this game where astronauts always say that when they are up in the space station, when they've gone to space, they've come back down with this new appreciation for the world, right? They saw it without its borders. They saw it from this unique perspective. And now they see the oneness of

humanity in this kind of different way. And so Jeff Bezos also picked up on that, but in this really disgusting way. You lead a large life. Was it humbling? Oh, for sure it's humbling. You look at this thing and you see how small you are. You see that the world is big. You see the atmosphere is small. You see that there are no boundaries, no lines, no national state. You know, this world is full of not enough unifiers and too many vilifiers. And when you get up there, you see that we are one world. This is one planet. We should have a lot of unifiers. He sees that narrative and he said, oh yeah, like I see the world in a different way now. And he specifically focused on climate change, which is also a big

part of his kind of broader goal, right? His kind of argument for why we need to get off of the planet and live in space colonies and move heavy polluting industries in particular into space. And it was that point in particular that he repeated in some of these interviews, where he said that, you know, in order to address the climate crisis, we need to move polluting industries off of Earth. They need to happen in space so they're not polluting down here. We live on this beautiful planet.

It's the most beautiful planet in the solar system by far. And we have to keep it safe and protect it. And the way to do that is slowly over decades to move all heavy industry, all polluting industry out into space. That's what we're going to do so we can keep this planet the gem that it is. I think we need to recognize and call that out for what it is, and that is pure climate denialism. The idea that moving polluting industries to space is going to do anything to address climate change is a pure lie. When are these industries moving to space? Seriously, in hundreds of years? And

where do our emissions come from? It's not all from heavy industry. It's from the cars that Elon Musk wants us to keep driving. It's from the power plants that burn coal and oil. And if Jeff Bezos seriously wants us to think that moving heavy industry into space would be in any way economical and is something that capitalism would like allow and accept these higher costs. Like it's just a fantasy. It's not true. We are at a moment where we need to rapidly change the way that we live in the next few decades, but especially in the decade ahead of us. And moving industry to space will not contribute to that at all, in no way, shape, or form. Meanwhile, as Jeff Bezos says this, I'm sure his own emissions are massive on a personal level,

because, you know, he's a billionaire, he has a ton of houses, he has a massive yacht, I'm sure he takes private planes all over the place, and now he's taking trips to space. And then on top of that, Amazon's emissions are also soaring. They increased by 19% last year. Amazon is not meeting its climate targets and is actually working with oil companies to help them extract more oil. And they're doing that through the use of these kind of big data tools with AWS to more efficiently extract. That is not how you address climate change. And throwing out some like stupid idea about moving production to space is not going to change that. Because let's be

serious about it for a second. If moving production to space isn't going to be possible in the timeline that we need to radically transform the way that we live, the way that we produce things, the way that we produce energy, in order to do it in a more sustainable way, we won't need to move those things to space in like 50 or 100 years when that becomes feasible, if it ever becomes feasible. So by the time that we could move things to space, we wouldn't have to because we would have already solved this problem. And why would we then revert to a dirtier, worse way of doing things if we have already solved this issue. And hopefully, we will solve it. And people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk won't hold us back from doing that so that we don't have massive climate refugee crises and flooding of cities and everything

else that we're already seeing on this unprecedented scale, it feels like, this summer, with massive floodings around the world, with heat waves and heat domes in not only North America, but in Asia as well, where parts of Pakistan reach these wet bulb temperatures where, you know, people's bodies can't even cool down because it's so hot. And so climate change is here. And the idea that some billionaire is going to say, oh yeah, but one of our solutions is going to be moving heavy industry to space is like ridiculous on its face. It's not a real solution. It's climate denial. It's just another one of these lies that these companies

and these capitalists put out. And so I want to end this episode with this. You know, we've covered a lot of ground, I think. I think I've gotten a lot of criticisms in at these visions of space. But think about it this way. We're often told that these billionaires are going to develop these kind of space colonies, and then they're going to take off, and they're going to leave us here after accelerating climate change. But that is not going to happen. The visions that they're selling us of space are lies. They are not going to happen, at least not in any timeline that is like worth seriously thinking about, not in our lifetimes. And so what they're actually doing is distracting us so that they can control this new infrastructure

of space for their own personal gain. The United States is trying to assert its power now to show that it can still be a technological player as it's increasingly feeling pressure from China. And these billionaires want to cash in on that. They want to benefit. They want to get all of these public contracts that the United States is going to be putting out to fund these projects. And at the same time, they profit from not addressing climate change. Elon Musk does as well. I know that members of his cult think that he's actually trying to do something to help the planet because he's promoting electric cars and whatnot. Maybe to a little degree, but he's also working against the larger changes that we need.

He's promoting cars for tunnels instead of subways and better bus services because he says that those are inconvenient and there could be serial killers on them and he prefers individualized transportation. He tried to kill California's high-speed rail system by promoting the Hyperloop proposal that was only created to try to kill the high-speed rail system. And more recently, Fort Lauderdale was looking for a tunnel for a train, and when they called in Elon Musk and the Boring Company, its negotiators convinced them to accept a tunnel for Teslas to the beach instead. And that's not to mention selling people the fantasy of autonomous cars for years. So what is the future that these billionaires are actually trying to build? It's not one that is egalitarian, sustainable, that works for all of us. It's one where they continue to profit while sealing themselves off from the very problems that they're causing in the world, whether that's related to inequality, whether that's related to climate change.

They are not going to retreat to Elysium, to the space colony, as that film would have us believe. They will just retreat behind their walls here on Earth. They will retreat into their gated communities that could potentially be powered by off-grid renewable energies with the batteries that Tesla is creating. And they will have their cyber trucks with the bulletproof glass and the dent-proof panels so that they can still drive around and not have to feel threatened by the rest of us. And who knows, maybe someday Elon Musk will actually build his tunnel system, but it won't be for everybody. It will be for the rich people to get between their gated communities,

to get to their private airports, and to get to the other areas where they like to hang out and socialize. And when the climate crisis really does get worse, when there are serious natural disasters that are destroying cities and that cause people to flee, that's no problem for these people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and these other billionaires, people who are already buying up property in New Zealand, who already have multiple homes. And so when something happens, they can hop on a private jet ahead of time and get out of the way while everyone else kind of suffers and has to deal with it. We can't be distracted by these grand visions that these billionaires are putting out because they are lies. They are marketing, they are PR, they're designed to get us to buy into them so that they can continue taking over more and more aspects of our lives, profiting from that, and ultimately stopping us from addressing the serious crises that we actually face and that we need to deal with if we're going to build a better world for everybody and not just for billionaires.

We're not going to be living on space colonies floating in space or colonies on Mars, not in our lifetimes, if ever. And so what we desperately need is not just to challenge the narratives that these billionaires are putting out, but also the power that they hold that allows them to ensure that the future they want and the regulations they want get adopted and get forwarded and get supported by state power. So I hope that this episode hasn't left you too depressed about the state of things, but I do think it's absolutely essential that we understand what is going on here and that we don't get caught up in these visions and these lies that are being put out and that we actually deal with the facts and that we

actually deal with what is going on and we try to get people to actually realize what is going on instead of being sold the illusion. So for those of you who listened to this episode, who allowed me to talk into your ear even without a guest, I thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Next week, we'll be back to having guests again, as I usually do. And if you want to learn more about the things that I've discussed in this week's episode, I'll put plenty of links down in the show notes so you can do that.

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