Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Three of the richest billionaires on Earth are now spending billions to exit Earth’s atmosphere and enter into space. The world is watching — and reflecting.

Some charmed commentators say the billionaires racing into space aren’t just thrilling humankind — they’re uplifting us. The technologies they develop “could benefit people worldwide far into the future,” says Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley.

But most commentators seem to be taking a considerably more skeptical perspective.

They’re dismissing the space antics of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as the ego trips of bored billionaires — “cynical stunts by disgustingly rich businessmen,” as one British analyst puts it, “to boost their self-importance at a time when money and resources are desperately needed elsewhere.”

“Space travel used to be about ‘us,’ a collective effort by the country to reach beyond previously unreachable limits,” writes author William Rivers Pitt. “Now, it’s about ‘them,’ the 0.1 percent.”

The best of these skeptical commentators can even make us laugh.

“Really, billionaires?” comedian Seth Meyers asked earlier this month. “This is what you’re going to do with your unprecedented fortunes and influence? Drag race to outer space?”

Let’s enjoy the ridicule. But let’s not treat the billionaire space race as a laughing matter.

Let’s see it as a wake-up call — a reminder that we don’t only get billionaires when wealth concentrates. We get a society that revolves around the egos of the most affluent and an economy where the needs of average people don’t particularly matter.

Characters like Elon Musk, notes Paris Max, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, are using “misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement” and gain tax-dollar support for various projects “designed to work best — if not exclusively — for the elite.”

The three corporate space shells for Musk, Bezos and Branson — SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic — have “all benefited greatly through partnerships with NASA and the U.S. military,” notes CNN Business. Their common corporate goal: to get satellites, people, and cargo “into space cheaper and quicker than has been possible in decades past.”

Branson is hawking tickets for roundtrips “to the edge of the atmosphere and back” at $250,000 per head. He’s planning some 400 such trips a year, observes British journalist Oliver Bullough, about “almost as bad an idea as racing to see who can burn the rainforest quickest.”

The annual U.N. Emissions Gap Report last year concluded that the world’s richest 1 percent do more to foul the atmosphere than the entire poorest 50 percent combined. Opening space to rich people’s joyrides would stomp that footprint even bigger.

Bezos and Musk seem to have grander dreams than mere space tourism — they’re looking to colonize space. They see space as a refuge from an increasingly inhospitable planet Earth. And they expect tax-dollar support to make their various pipe dreams come true.

How should we respond to all this?

We should, of course, be working to create a more hospitable planet for all humanity. In the meantime, advocates are circulating tongue-in-cheek petitions that urge terrestrial authorities not to let orbiting billionaires back on Earth.

“Billionaires should not exist…on Earth or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there,” reads one Change.org petition nearing 200,000 signatures.

Ric Geiger, the 31-year-old automotive-supplies account manager behind that effort, is hoping his petition helps the issue of maldistributed wealth “reach a broader platform.”

Activists like Geiger are going down the right track. We don’t need billionaires to “conquer space.” We need to conquer inequality.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is an associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of The Rich Don’t Always Win and The Case for a Maximum Wage.

This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.