[This post originally appeared as a LinkedIn article on 3 January 2023.]

[This is an excerpt from a video I posted on my YouTube channel.]

Why should we go into space when we have so many problems on Earth that we have yet to solve? That is BY FAR the most common question asked of anyone working in the space industry.

However, many (if not ALL) of us working in the space industry believe that humanity can go into space AND ALSO solve all of our most pressing problems here on Earth. All it takes is an “abundance mindset”.

Here is a thought exercise to show how this may be possible:

A few months ago, Elon Musk got into a Twitter spat with David Beasley, the head of the World Food Programme. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially Beasley said that Elon could eradicate world hunger if he would just donate $6B to the WFP. Elon replied that he would be happy to do so, if Beasley could provide transparency into how the funds would be used to provide food directly to those who needed it. After Beasley clarified that he meant $6B per year, the high-profile spat eventually just died out quietly.

However, this exchange provides a good framework for bringing an abundance mindset to the question at hand.

Let’s say that Beasely was correct but underestimated. Let’s say that we could eradicate world hunger, but for, say, $10B per year. That’s one of the many problems facing humanity on Earth today, and we could solve it with only $10B per year.

And how many other problems do we want to solve?

Well, a few years ago the United Nations adopted its Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This is a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future”. They include David Beasley’s goal of eradicating world hunger (which is SDG #2), as well as other critical issues like poverty, health, education, gender equality, clean water, energy, etc. While this is likely not a comprehensive list, for the purposes of this thought exercise we could use it as a proxy for questioning better uses of space resources.

So … let’s say that we want to eradicate all 17 of the issues covered by the UN’s SDGs. In fact, let’s allow some leeway and assume that the UN left out a few, so let’s call it an even 20 issues.

Let’s also assume that Beasley’s low-ball estimate to eradicate world hunger could be a proxy for eradicating each of the other issues, so we can estimate $10B/year for each of the 20 issues, which gives us $200B per year for humanity to solve 20 of our most pressing issues.

In fact, let’s assume that this is also a low-ball figure because some issues (say, health) may require more than the $10B/year needed for world hunger. Therefore, let’s take the $200B/year and double it to $400B. In fact, let’s make it an even $500B just to make it easier to do some high-level math.

What we end up with is an estimated budget of $500B per year to completely solve all of the world’s problems today.

From an abundance mindset, the question then becomes, can humanity actually afford $500B per year? Or, even better, does humanity even have $500B/year?

Well, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global Gross Domestic Product (or GDP) for 2022 is estimated to be $104T. That’s “trillion” with a “T”, or a thousand billions. Let’s call it an even $100T, again for ease of calculation.

This means that we could solve all of the world’s issues if we simply dedicated ½ of 1% of our annual global GDP to this effort. (That’s $500 billion out of $100 trillion.)

That’s it.

Think about this and let it sink in.

Yes, I admit that my model is quite basic and perhaps oversimplified. However, my general point remains: clearly, the world has more than enough financial resources to solve all of our many problems. We also have more than enough human capital to solve these problems, since our global population is nearing 8 billion people.

[Please watch the full video on my YouTube channel.]