Greed Spiral

Musk's letter asking SpaceX employees to work over the Thanksgiving weekend raised my eyebrows. It is a typical example of greed and hunger for success which results in objectification of humans. All fueled by greed.

This email can be translated as follows:

If you give up your family life and the most important holiday, me and my fellow investors will get even richer from this project which destroys global resources to deliver services people would be happy to live without.

Satellite internet is not something we desperately need or cannot live without. There are plenty of alternatives. And even in places where there is no Internet, let it be. Nobody has said the Internet must be available in every remote corner of the globe. Starlink is a business idea and as such is conceived to make money and make the founders and investors rich. Like every other business. The problem with Starlink is that it in fact does not solve any burning problem, while bringing multiple concerns with it. 

Most of the concerns are environmental. The environment is a humanity shared resource. It is equally mine, as yours as is Elon's. Now SpaceX has a project which will end up in multiple rocket launches per month, each rocket powered by 33 of these engine monsters. Each launch burning our oxygen, polluting the atmosphere and trashing the sky with hundreds of satellites, to the total of about 12 thousand. These satellites will ruin the night skies around the globe forever.

It clearly is a mad man's idea. And the worst thing is this idea is trashing our precious resources - the air and the sky. Of course from the legal standpoint SpaceX is an American company which got the authorization from an American agency for this project. I'm not entirely sure majority of Americans support that project. People are simply unaware. But on top of that, what rights has any American agency to authorize a project that contributes to the global climate crisis and pollutes the global night sky. The negative effects far outweigh the benefits, and the benefits here are mostly financial, for a small group of people. This is not something that is good for most of us.

Which comes down to personal responsibility of the leader. Personal ambitions and financial greed, jointly described as entrepreneurship, lead here permanent global loses and degradation of human-to-human relations, bringing associations of forced labor.

By the way, among many similar cases, where money trumps humanity, the recent move by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) stands out with its suspension of tennis tournaments in China.