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On Thursday, SpaceX completed its fourth test flight of Starship, the largest and most powerful spacecraft in history. It was a massive success. The rocket booster made a soft, vertical splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the upper stage finished its journey to orbit and back mostly intact. While we celebrate, we shouldn’t forget that last year, when Starship’s first flight with its booster ended in an explosion, it was widely mocked.
Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos’s space race faced similar treatment, with NBC News publishing an Op-Ed headlined: “Richard Branson space flight beats out Jeff Bezos. But all of humanity loses.” Some of this criticism stems from envy and resentment towards billionaires, but it also speaks to a deeply rooted, underlying skepticism about innovation. For most of human history, we lived in a truly Malthusian environment with strict limits on our population and activities. The historian Stephen Davies theorizes that this scarcity led to strong taboos against risk-taking:
“There are very powerful social practices, norms, and institutions that inhibit innovation. And the reason makes perfect sense because, in a Malthusian world, innovation is very, very risky because most innovations fail. And so, if you use up scarce resources on a new innovative way of doing things, those resources are probably going to be wasted in most cases. And that might be the difference between making it through the winter and starving to death.”
In short, many of us are still, psychologically, living in a zero-sum world. If you believe total wealth is fixed, an exploding rocket looks like nothing more than a burning pile of money. This also helps explain the egalitarian flavor of the criticism, which tended to focus on all the other things that money could have accomplished if it was spent by a charity or welfare program.
The problem with that line of reasoning isn’t that it’s strictly false; the money spent on Starship could have bought food for the hungry or houses for the homeless. The problem is that innovation, with all its risks and waste, is the only thing that can end privation for good. So, while it’s good to celebrate a successful innovation, it’s also important to be brave enough to applaud a failure. Doing so helps hold back the ancient Malthusian impulses that threaten to bind us to stagnation.
Malcolm Cochran, Digital Communications Manager
Economics:
Energy & Environment:
- The Incredible Comeback of Britain’s Barn Owls
- Fusion Tech Finds Geothermal Energy Application
- Macquarie Island Remains Pest Free 10 Years after Eradication
- Microsoft AI Is First to Predict Air Pollution for the Whole World
- Study Finds Earth Warming, but No Evidence of Climate Change Accelerating
- Nonprofits Are Fund-Raising to Cap Abandoned Oil Wells
Health & Demographics:
- Blood Test Hailed as “Incredibly Exciting” Cancer Breakthrough
- A Pill for Postpartum Depression Is Finally Getting to Patients
- Ten-Minute Brain Scan Could Detect Dementia Early, Study Suggests
- Long-Term Changing Patterns of Suicide Mortality in China
- Gene Therapy Trial Gives Deaf Children Hearing in Both Ears
- Weight-Loss Drugs Cut Cancer Risk by a Fifth, Research Shows
- Male Birth Control Gel Shows Promise in Early-Stage Clinical Trials
- Zimbabwe Turns Tide on HIV
- AstraZeneca’s Tagrisso Greatly Slows Cancer for Some People
- Cancer-Fighting Antibodies Inject Chemo Directly into Tumor Cells
- Ro Launches GLP-1 Supply Tracker to Mitigate Shortages
- Trial Results for New Lung Cancer Drug Are “Off the Charts”
- Scientists Develop Cheap and Quick Test for Prostate Cancer
Science & Technology:
- AI Used to Predict Potential New Antibiotics
- Lab-Grown Gemstones Revolutionize Diamond Industry
- A New Search for Ripples in Space from the Beginning of Time
- Lunar Probe Is First to Land on Far Side of the Moon
- Startup Brings New Hope to the Pursuit of Reviving Frozen Bodies