The tech billionaires are competing in the space race fundamentally not because they have imagination but because they don’t have imagination. A couple of decades ago the previous generation of rich tech boys sought to out-compete each other with G550s and massive yachts; now they’re doing it with rockets. Most of the reasoning is spurious (think life on Earth is bad? try living in a can on Mars and be utterly dependent on your life support systems…) or just plain stupid (“in 5 billion years the sun will expand and fry the Earth” “oh, wait, no complex species has survived more than a few million years….”).

The thing is, billionaires can’t easily compete for status by doing sensible things like trying to reduce environmental degradation or work to change incentives that lead to ever-more CO2 entering the atmosphere. Those things don’t grab headlines, aren’t great dinner-party chatter, and won’t impress the billionaire-next-door. And in the end, that’s really all the tech boys care about, and so space dreams are the easiest way to get there.