Don't forget the assumption that these are baby steps toward the eventual goal of colonizing space, a deeply dorky outcome that ignores all the inhospitable-but-unclaimed territories here on Earth, and that assumes we can somehow outrun climate collapse (something that billionaires could pour their money into averting, and get legitimately great attention for). But part of the issue there is that if you're the type of billionaire dead set on becoming a space tourist, you probably also just blithely assume the world is going to innovate itself out of catastrophe. A highly cool way to think, given that the climate disasters are already happening, and there's not a single solution in sight.
This!
Especially as far as Elongated Muskrat is concerned.
Muskrat likes to style himself as some great inventor on par with Nikola Tesla but history proves otherwise. He is, as many forget, the man who held a much-ballyhooed press conference to announce the Hyperloop, which basically amounted to him saying that there should be an underground high-speed rail line that goes from Los Angeles to San Francisco and that someone should actually design it, pay for it, and run through all of the legal hoops necessary and give Musk all of the credit for the idea.
That's not inventing; it's daydreaming.
We know how to put people into space. A billionaire space race is useless on that front. What we don't know how to do is establish long-term outposts past LEO.
Colonizing Mars and the Moon are wrongheaded goals right now. Instead of trying to figure out how to farm on other planets, we need to be figuring out how to continue being able to farm on the Earth.
Last week, a significant part of Washington State's agricultural economy cooked in its shells in Puget Sound. Down the coast, California, America's actual breadbasket, is having the second "century" drought in less than a decade.
How do we solve these problems?
Innovation and invention can only do so much. Right now, the inventor crowd thinks that we can just innovate our way out of environmental collapse. We can't. Desal plants are not the same as "Create Food & Water" spells.
Until people take a good hard honest look at the massive social changes that are needed, we, as a species, are going to die. Slowly and painfully.
And the billionaire space tourists would do well to remember that launching themselves into space is useless if Earth isn't habitable. Before we can terraform Mars, we should probably figure out how to terraform Earth.