Some people argue that we should first solve earth’s most pressing problems before turning our attention to space.
These are solutions to earth’s most pressing problems:
- Food Security:
- Stop fighting & corruption, use multi-cropping, green the deserts
- Water Shortage:
- Replenish aquifers, desalination has become cheap & the world is richer
- Desertification:
- World Peace:
- Talk more about peace than war, find ways to work together inspite of differences, agree to disagree without fighting or building walls
- Inequality and poverty:
- Make everybody rich, use the abundance of the solar system
- Energy shortage:
- All solutions already exist, invest in a national transitional plan, crowdsource, press repeat. Consider Fusion Energy as a bonus but know that solar, wind and hydro-electric energy are all ready to e part of a mix to supply base load power on the scale of households, cities, regions and continents.
- International debt:
- Erase debts every 7 and 50 years. This will discipline both lender and lessee
- Pollution:
- Accept and implement rules and new technologies
- Global Warming:
- Adapt to sea level rise, experiment with terraforming the CO2 atmosphere on MARS before you Geo-engineer earth
- Religious intolerance:
- Be tolerant, you too atheist
- Terrorism:
- Be intolerant to potential misuse of the term
It might seem these are naive answers to difficult questions, but these are all solutions unbiased experts accept as doable. All of the suggestions are valid, possible options to tackle Earth’s challenges.You can disagree with them, and their implementation, but the list shows that the world does have options today to solve all Earths issues. And many professionals and experts are busy implementing them.
This means that the issues we need to deal on Earth are covered. It might not seem like it because of the typical chaos involved, but we are indeed working to have our house on order. To me this means that we can also focus some of our efforts on tackling the challenge of trying to access and explore deep space without having to feel guilty about it.
Usually, where a commercial technological solution exists that outperforms old technology on cost, and profit, implementation is quick. So most of the time you just have to figure out a way in which the market is incentivized to solve the issue for you. You can solve these issues with public money or with private money. Honestly, I don’t really care.
I just want to be free enough to build a spaceship and explore deep space. Luckily today governments of the USA, EU, ASIA do allow their citizens to pursue and build civilian solutions to access space. So I am very happy to grow up in this generation and not the former because today small businesses have the necessary computing power and access to good engineering and modern commercial materials to allow them to do with a small team what only governments could do before. The free market has enough investors willing to jump in and this is clearly demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which many initiatives -captured with the umbrella term “NEW SPACE” or “SPACE 2.0”- have been started and brought to success since the turn of the century.
Yes, international export controls, prevention of proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction remains very important and influential, but as long as you respect those frameworks and work together with your government, you can go ahead and bring these projects to fruition and have access to a global market of customers and passengers.
These are indeed very exciting times for commercial space ship builders!
