I saw an interesting new show on Friday night on HBO, it’s hosted by actor/comedian Wyatt Cenac, and it’s called Problem Areas. On the show, Cenac examines quite a few social and cultural issues that we face here in the United States. The program has the potential to be a breakthrough, especially in the current climate our country is facing. Cenac offers a thoughtful approach to the issues rather than standing on a preachy soapbox.
I’m going to focus on a particular topic in this episode.
At last night’s premiere, one of the topics he tackled was billionaires and space exploration. She made a point about billionaires suddenly being interested in leaving Earth and going into space.
When you bring up the topic of billionaires and space exploration, I guess you should single out Elon Musk. Cenac points out that Elon’s quest for space exploration could be considered problematic due to the fact, in his opinion, that Elon is also from South Africa. He joked that his comments could be considered racist, but so was apartheid.
As Cenac continued, he brought up Musk’s recent launch of his Tesla roadster into orbit.
These comments surprised me a bit, but the truth is that they made me think. Was Cenac saying that Musk’s being a South African is somehow responsible for the ills of apartheid and therefore unqualified to participate in an evolutionary step for humanity? I have a serious problem with that assumption. But maybe since Cenac is a comedian, he was making a joke, but his comment seemed strangely serious.
To be fair, he did talk about Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and one or two others, but he devoted most of his commentary in this segment to Musk.
The entire segment of billionaires in space alluded to the fact that men of massive wealth simply want to leave the planet they ruined without providing a solution and leaving us commoners behind. There is a big problem with that theory. Unless there is a secret planet in our own solar system that is habitable and all it takes is a quick rocket ride to get there, then Cenac’s message at that point doesn’t hold up.
Currently, none of us can get on a 737 or a Cessna and leave Earth’s atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy, manpower, and capital to get into space, especially if you want to go to a certain destination like a space station. We would have to be in the Star Trek era for something like that.
For him to suggest that billionaires are trying to escape a planet that screwed up, then these guys are in for a rude awakening. Without commoners on earth there is no infrastructure, no base of operations, and some rich guys aren’t going to have any structured kind of survival.
The bottom line is that space travel requires a lot of people and capital to reach orbit, which means it has to be a country or people with means to achieve this goal. If these guys are willing to put up the capital to get us into space travel, so be it. Gone is the argument about wasting tax money.
