Who gets to inherit the stars? A space ethicist on what we’re not talking about
In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades” and “mostly,” he’d said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the actual work in space. No doubt that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” to orbit for a month than to develop better machines. In the moment, few in the…
