Private colonization is a joke- assign it zero risk

(Sim,Sim Kern is a Gulf Coast journalist and speculative fiction writer, exploring intersections of climate change, identity, and social justice , 7-7)

And what about Musk's dream of a colony on Mars, or at least the Moon? Those are astronomically less feasible. The farther away from Earth you're trying to sustain life in space, the harder it gets. And while they have the benefit of gravity, the surface of the Moon and Mars are covered with a powdery regolith that gums up mechanisms. NASA is currently working on sending astronauts to live on the Moon as part of the Artemis mission. They've been working on Artemis plans for years and will continue to plan for years more before sending the first crew to sleep on the Moon — for a week or two, max. No, there will be no Moon-a-Lago, let alone a Mars-a-Lago, in our lifetimes. So despite Musk's lofty claims of making humanity "a multi-planetary species," that's way, way beyond the realm of current technical possibility. And his claim is especially absurd, considering that in order to generate the wealth that sustains billionaires like Musk, we're rapidly destroying the one planet we can live on — Earth. If we don't reverse the environmental and societal degradation caused by global capitalism, the ISS may turn out to be the pinnacle of human space exploration. Advertisement: So when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons. Branson and Bezos aren't investing their money to forward science or expand the bounds of human possibility. They're doing it to be the first rich guy to bounce around uselessly up there, as opposed to NASA astronauts who, again, do science. And after they bounce around uselessly, they're hoping to swindle more of their obscenely rich friends into doing the same. The pointlessness of it all is especially despicable when you understand that space tourism is funded with the hoarded wealth of billions of workers who are struggling to survive here on Earth. The space tourism industry will be built with the profits off supply chains that work people to death-by-exhaustion, literally enslave people, and are rapidly destroying the future habitability of our planet. That's a pretty bleak dystopia. We should really consider taking our wealth back from billionaires before they build it. But if we fail, join me in enjoying the schadenfreude. Space tourism will inevitably suck. Our billionaires won't find anything up there but a whole lot of time to sit with the gaping void in their hearts, which space certainly won't fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they're constipated as hell from astronaut food. The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the people most responsible. But at least they will not be able to escape to some other, better place. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.