When reckless men penetrate the celestial space in their flying chests, and in that through competition, this can only be criticized to a limited extent. Your success is given to the successful. It gets even worse if they spend their money in public, for universal pleasure, and thus, as if by the way, take humanity as a whole a step further.
Unfortunately, they both lied. They don’t fly with their money. They are bringing humanity back.
Let’s forget Richard Branson, the relatively poor guy who won the race that day. During his spaceflight, he seemed to be an excited retiree who, looking out the window of a Concorde, stammered at the most expected: “The view is breathtaking!”
But when Jeff Bezos shot himself into space this Tuesday, to the admiration of an admiring audience, one must stop for a moment and look at the moral plate on display in all its outrageous glory.
So, while for the first time entire cities are uninhabitable for climatic reasons, heat bells are burning large parts of North America, while elsewhere clouds are swamping entire landscapes, while people are killing themselves because they cannot afford expensive insulin nor Even in rich countries with three jobs to make ends meet, while the majority are fighting to survive on all possible fronts, an elite minority can leave the planet without further ado – even if only for a short time.
As if standing in line in front of Mount Everest
Jeff Bezos dreams of outsourcing the manufacture of giant structures that will one day produce their own waste and add value in orbit. His rival Elon Musk is already setting up a satellite loop for the global internet, even in the most remote areas. His long-term goal is not colonies on the Moon, but the colonization of Mars. Presumably, he’s already taking care of the land here, with electric vehicles, compressed air tubes to transport people, and advanced photovoltaics.
Even when it was still a national effort, eventually space travel was just an overwhelming routine. What’s really exciting about the International Space Station is that it’s international.
Richard Branson in orbit is a pioneer only in that he can raise finances to realize his dream. Gagarin was a pioneer, and Branson is just a tourist — he treats his idol as one of the millionaires queuing down Mount Everest, to Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
The current spectacle has nothing to do with past races on the frontier – the first transatlantic flight, the first Antarctic flag, and the first man on the moon. The virtues and madness she needed in the past, from thirst for adventure to willingness to take risks, vision and lust for fame, all of this is now wrapped into the entrepreneurial paradigm, as exemplified by Bezos O. musk. The record is good too. Whoever can afford it wins.
Those who can afford it can also reasonably pay their employees — and still pay for the trip to the moon. Anyone who has particularly heavenly ambitions and is able to carry them out can make a whole series of earthly problems disappear with the touch of a finger. And do not.
With China, capitalism has already changed its host. Under dictatorial conditions, it thrives much faster than in the “Western democracies” with which it has been associated for so long. In the West, on the other hand, capital is already trying to reach areas where – on asteroids or distant planets – the resources are supposed to be as unlimited as the spaces themselves.
Played “Grand Theft Capitalism” through
Essentially, Jeff Bezos should be arrested by the tax authorities immediately after a successful landing hopefully at the latest. Marxist experts can add that now, at the latest, evidence has been provided that billionaires shouldn’t exist at all.
Maximum tax instead of minimum tax, like that idea, and the land would be a better place. Anyone who, let’s say, owned ten million dollars (not to mention 200 billion Jeff Bezos) who would have played through “Grand Theft Capitalism”, so to speak, and won, would receive a medal and be allowed to go home. Anything created after a certain amount will go to the community.
But this will again be a naive quarrel on the part of envious people and other unemployed people. Sober economists patiently explain that not only space travel, but more recently even the dream of space travel, has already been privatized. Nonsense with the universe, aside from false human bells, is of course a business model.
It is also public money, that is, tax money, with which Elon Musk makes his rockets for the US space agency, which Jeff Bezos deals with advanced armaments projects with. Public attention is a lubricant for this coup. And if it becomes really profitable at some point, it will definitely not be available to the general public.
This painting will be seen in a bad mood. Wealth is so absurdly unevenly distributed that few clowns can go off into the universe with great fanfare. While the majority have to survive on a planet headed for horrific conditions from an economic and environmental point of view – and they are asked to pay tribute to the outrageous spectacle in which his money is literally burning.
