Every billionaire with a rocket sells the same story: they are saving us. Earth is fragile, the future is dangerous, and they are the ones who will get humanity through it. It is a rescue, and they are the only rescue on offer. None of which is true. They are not doing this to save you and me, and our neighbours. They are doing it for ego, for power, and for growth, because a man who already owns this much of the planet starts to find the planet small. They will tell you Earth is finite, that infinite growth on one world is impossible, so we have no choice but to expand outward. But the limit they have run into is not the planet's. It is their own. And what they are selling is not a solution to that limit, it is a way to keep growing past it, somewhere new. Bezos says he wants to move heavy industry off Earth so the planet can stay a treasure, and Musk says Mars is humanity's backup drive, and both of them would like you to hear this as generosity. But Musk's own pay package only pays out once a million people are actually standing on Mars, which means the moment he saves the species is also the moment he collects, and once salvation and payday are the same milestone it stops being obvious that we are the ones being rescued. Wealth is no sort of power at all unless you make it one. Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers.- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and Other Stories The billionaire brain is not a metaphor. Paul Piff spent years at Berkeley proving that as people get richer, their empathy goes down. Money, he said, makes you more likely to act like a jerk. Dacher Keltner found the same from the other side: feeling powerful shuts off the parts of the brain that enable you to read other people. Two decades of studies, and the findings only became more concrete. The more power someone holds, the less they can see the world from anyone else's perspective. Then that brain runs into the one thing money can never fix, which is that the man hoarding is is going to die anyway. Terror Management Theory is the research on what we do with that knowledge, and the finding is that we manage the fear of dying by building things meant to outlast us. For most people that is children, or work. For a man with unlimited money and no real sense of anyone else, it is a rocket with his name on it, or a bunker under a mountain. Both are built to survive the end of the world rather than prevent it, and neither has room in the plan for the rest of us. We get into the money too, the speed and size of the space industry, and what those same fortunes could do aimed at the ground instead of the sky. It does not tie up in a bow, which is the honest answer. Overview Effect can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. - Will Shatner & Josh Brandon All The Receipts on our substack https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit doinggoodbadly.substack.com
