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How Silicon Valley can take us to the stars
There's never been a better time to angel invest in interstellar travel
At an Indiana rally the other day, Bernie Sanders said he wanted to "tell the billionaire class" something. A member of the audience offered, "To [expletive] off," to which Sanders replied, "Well, that's one way to phrase it."
I know, right? American billionaires are the worst. Especially the ones in Silicon Valley. Advancing breakthrough technologies that will put millions out of work, like those running taxicab cartels. Creating cool new products and services for consumers to waste their money on. Making the economy's inequality levels look terrible compared to Iceland and Slovenia. Why aren't we hitting them with sky-high taxes rates on their income and wealth? After all, they're probably just wasting all that dough on crazy desert festivals.
But maybe, just maybe, some good can come out of all that disruptive innovating and the billions that flow from it: Making humanity a multi-planetary species. Entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, doesn't just want to put payloads and people in orbit at comparatively low cost. He wants to put a colony on Mars. And just a few weeks ago, Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner joined physicist Stephen Hawking in announcingStarshot, a $100 million project to send a probe to Alpha Centauri in only 20 years. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is also a board member.
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And who knows, maybe some smart use of venture-capital funding could even take humanity itself beyond the solar system. That's the premise of Arkwright, the latest novel by science-fiction writer Allen Steele and a pretty good argument for the privatization of space travel.
It's the story of dying sci-fi novelist Nathan Arkwright — someone of the stature of Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — who realizes his dreams of man's adventures in space aren't coming true. So he decides to do it himself as an angel investor of sorts. Rather than bequeathing his estate to relatives, his fortune and all future sales and royalties from his book will be used to invest in new technologies that can eventually result in the building of a starship. It will be a private sector effort with little government involvement. As an associate of Arkwright explains:
It won't be made public, and there won't be government involvement either. We don't want this to become another NASA project that gets scuttled because Congress can't get off its dead ass and give it decent funding. So we're going at it alone. [Arkwright]
To be clear, Steele has great respect for NASA, but is skeptical that Congress would ever properly fund such an ambitious project. As Steele told me in a recent podcast, using private funds means "you cut politics out of it. You cut taxpayer money out of the whole thing."
There's a lot of truth in Steele's fiction. NASA spending has been flat for years, while public investment in basic research has been declining for decades as a share of GDP. So is it really so bad that wealthy Americans who grew up on science fiction like Star Trek and Star Wars are picking up the slack? (Today is Star Wars Day, by the way. May the Fourth be with you.)
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"Exploration is in our nature," astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars." And even if the tech elite don't finance a 100-year starship, they've at least begun to reinvigorate human space travel and exploration. These efforts will one day allow us to mine the solar system's riches, save ourselves from a killer asteroid, and, you know, explore.
James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.
