December 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 79Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University
of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science
and a regular contributor to the New York Times. Her book,
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,
was published by Yale University Press in 2017.THE INTERSECTION
WHERE SCIENCE AND SOCIETY MEETIllustration by Catarina MoutaWhat’s the Deal
with Rich Men
and Space?
Their obsession harks back to “classic”
sci-fi—but there’s a more socially
conscious kindBy Zeynep TufekciTech billionaire Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, is try-
ing to buy up all the houses in Boca Chica, Tex.—a tiny commu-
nity of just a few dozen people—so he can use the area to launch
his Mars spaceship. He says he might have people on their way
to the Red Planet within a decade.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also has a spaceflight company, Blue
Origin, and he sees the project as a stepping-stone to a future of
space colonies. Bezos envisions that one day a trillion or more
humans could be living somewhere else in the solar system, leav-
ing Earth behind as a sort of park. The late Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen founded Stratolaunch, which similarly had space trav-
el in its sights. (There’s also Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic;
he’s not from the tech industry, but still... .) These men aren’t nec-
essarily focused exclusively on space, but why do they put billions
toward launching hu mans out there? One reason is that Earth is
threatened with climate change and nuclear war; space is a kind
of plan B. But a crewed flight to Mars is full of perils—most nota-
bly the fact that we don’t currently have a way of protecting
humans from the adverse effects of months and months of deep-
space radiation. And once we get there, the planet’s lack of a sig-
nificant magnetic field or atmosphere means the threat will still
be substantial. It’s also not clear whether proposed plans for haul-
ing the tons of supplies needed to make life there even barely pos-
sible could work as well as envisioned (or at all).
Still, what’s wrong with dreaming, right? In one sense, noth-
ing. But in another, it matters how people with a lot of money
dream. Bezos, Allen and Musk all have talked about their love of
science fiction as part of their inspiration for in vesting in space.
Bezos spent his summers reading authors such as Isaac Asimov
and Robert A. Heinlein. Allen so loved his boyhood science-fic-
tion collection that when he discovered that his mother had sold
his books, he had the entire collection re-created.
As a former science-fiction geek myself, I can only sympathize.
At its best, though, science fiction is a brilliant vehicle for explor-
ing not the far future or the scientifically implausible but the inter-
actions among science, technology and society. The what-if sce-
narios it poses can allow us to understand our own societies better,
and sometimes that’s best done by dispensing with scientific plau-
sibility. For example, Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant book The Left
Hand of Darkness imagines an envoy from Terra (our Earth) to
Gethen, a planet without fixed boundaries between genders.
Through the hero’s encounter with an “ambisexual” species, we
end up interrogating our own cultural norms around masculinity
and femininity—groundbreaking for a book published in 1969.
Science fiction is sometimes denigrated as escapist literature,
but the best examples of it are exactly the opposite. For me, it’s not
the scientifically implausible part of science fiction that is most
interesting. It’s what the expanded imagination allows us to discov-
er about ourselves and our societies—and then to make them better.
Science and art have always been somewhat funded through
the eccentric interests of the wealthy, and the combination has
always been a mixed bag. One thing about being a billionaire is
that it’s probably not hard to find people who will encourage you
to spend money chasing space operas that either will not happen
because of scientific constraints or will end up in disaster.
But more important, tech billionaires can shape our lives
today, through how their companies operate, by repaying their
obligations to society through taxes on their enormous wealth (at
the moment, fairly little), and through their investments in solv-
ing the problems that threaten us. Doing that requires imagina-
tion. It’s just not the kind depicted on the covers of science-fiction
books I, too, read as a child; it’s the kind that takes us to expand-
ed universes only to have us think harder about how to under-
stand the one inhabitable place for us in this vast universe—our
fragile, pale blue dot—and make it a better place to live.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
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