Read on Twitter
This is colonialism. https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1304049845309669376
I want more lunar sample material on Earth. It's cheaper to have private companies do that. However, I do not want to extend to space the notion that whoever grabs first and has political & military might to defend their claim deserves to privatize and profit from it.
If we are paying private companies to return material for NASA curation and freely sharing with the rest of the world for scientific purposes, I'm cool with that. If we are establishing precedent to "extract and trade space resources"? That's a Nope from me.
Pressing forward on resource extraction without explicitly stating how we plan to make the future in space different from the past on Earth is a recipe to repeat shameful, environmentally destructive history.
This is a perfect example of technology development that is really cool and exciting and has huge potential and I want to see it happen! But if we do it without examining what the unintended consequences might be, it's going to cause disasters. See: Facebook.
This whole *waves hands* situation that we have going on right now is a direct result of people doing Cool Stuff without once considering How Things Could Go Wrong and especially Who Might Be Hurt.
Invent, develop cool new technology. AND examine, mitigate, and prevent the potential downsides. Above all, make sure that both the positives and negatives are evenly distributed, that benefit really will accrue to *everybody*, and first: do no harm.
End rant. Gonna turn off Twitter and go make something good that'll empower some people.
