The Universal Bureaucrats

There is a segment of the culture that wishes to place all of the universe outside the Earth under their control and veto human exploration. Here I take on some of the arguments.

A blog post by Maciej Cegłowski has recently being doing the rounds amongst the opponents of human space exploration, and I thought it should be debunked. This may not be of interest to all readers; if you haven’t and aren’t planning to read the blog post to which I am responding, you can skip this one. I have another more positive newsletter in the pipeline soon.

The content of the blog post is highly polemic, but does contain some actual substance in places. A great deal of it is directing contempt at proponents of Mars missions, NASA, SpaceX, and especially Elon Musk. This will play well with people who share these beliefs but is not in itself an argument of any kind.

It begins with portraying a supposed NASA mission to Mars as too expensive and taking too long, using some questionable assumptions I will address below. It then goings on to make claims about the categorical superiority of robots for exploration, and then gives an argument that human missions would present an unaccapta…