There Is No Business Case For Civilisation

Not everything in life is a pitch to a VC. Organising human activity purely on the basis of return on investment is a dead end philosophy masquerading as rationalism.

Years ago, around the time that Elon Musk first announced the architecture for going to Mars that would become Starship, I would often quip that SpaceX would send a human to Mars before the UK government could get a high speed train to Manchester. Even given the delays to Starship since then, my prediction has borne out well - Prime Minister Rishi Sunak earlier this year announced the cancellation of the part of High Speed 2 that would go to Manchester.

Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to talk about trains in the space blog. Please bear with me, it all makes sense in the end.

For my non-UK audience, High Speed 2 (HS2 for short) is a high speed rail project that starts in London, goes to Birmingham, and then splits in two with one fork going to Manchester and the other going towards Leeds. HS1, by the way, is the existing link between London and the Channel Tunnel, which connects the capital to the French high speed TGV network. Due to cost cutting measures, first the Leeds and then the Manches…