In addition to its position on Artificial Intelligencedefending that countries in the southern hemisphere need to develop AI to be able to compete with the richest countries, this Tuesday (13), during a speech at the conference of International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, President Lula took a dig at billionaires, such as Elon Musk, who consider the colonization of another planet, more specifically Mars, to be favorable.
Rockets to escape workers
“The concentration of income is so absurd that some individuals have their own space programs. Certainly, trying to find a better planet than Earth so as not to be among the workers who are responsible for their wealth. We don’t need to look for solutions on Mars. It is the Earth that needs our care”stated Lula.
The market race for space exploration
Although he did not mention the South African businessman by name, Elon Musk is one of the personalities who most mention the importance of looking at Mars as a support point for humanity. And he is not alone in this type of speech.
In 2016, during an interview with BBCphysicist Stephen Hawking stated that humans would need to leave Earth within 100 years if they wanted to survive.
“Although the chances of a natural disaster destroying planet Earth in a given year are very small, it is important to highlight that these chances have increased over time and will end up becoming a certainty for the next thousand to 10 thousand years. Therefore, we should already be spread throughout space and other stars, so that a disaster on Earth does not mean the end of the human race“, stated the physicist at the time.
The plans of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, are to enable a human civilization to be established on Mars within 30 years. Among the challenges, the financial issue is still the central point: “Today, you wouldn’t be able to fly to Mars even for US$1 trillion, so we have to overcome that”, stated the businessman in 2022, during an interview on Lex Friedman’s podcast.
In addition to Musk, other billionaires are interested in a new space race. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, and Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, also have their companies in this sector, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
As the BBC recalled in 2021, in the 1980s, Jeff Bezos participated in seminars by physicist Gerard O’Neill, at Princeton University, USA, and, even at that time, he aspired to be a space entrepreneur. Bezos even told his school newspaper that the “Earth is finite”, and that if the world economy and population continued to expand, space is the only way out.
Source: https://www.hardware.com.br/noticias/lula-diz-bilionarios-constroem-foguetes-para-fugir-de-trabalhadores.html
