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Billionaire Dreams Versus Human Reality
How to waste tens of billions of dollars on ego gratification
I suppose if you grew up watching Star Trek and Star Wars and were of a particularly impressionable nature you could end up imagining that it “makes sense” for humans to become “a space-faring civilization.” You could entertain grandiose dreams of a quasi-rational species colonizing the stars. Maybe you have novels by Arthur C. Clarke on your bookshelf. So if you became astoundingly wealthy you could imagine yourself “savior of humanity” because, well, it just makes sense to imagine that the destiny of the human race lies in the stars, or maybe the asteroid belt, or somewhere “out there.”
Except it doesn’t make sense. Not in any way. Not by any stretch of even the most gullible imagination.
First of all, a species isn’t a civilization. A species is a biological entity that’s evolved to adapt as well as possible to the environment(s) in which it has found itself. When you move a creature out of its environment it rarely does well, unless it becomes an invasive species and over-exploits its new environment until everything including itself dies.
If we look at our own species, the wildly mis-named homo sapiens, we see what happens when a species moves beyond the environment for which it’s adapted. For…
