In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades” and “mostly,” he’d said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the actual work in space.
No doubt that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” to orbit for a month than to develop better machines.
In the moment, few in the tech-forward audience seemed taken aback at what many might consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But that raised questions for me – and it has certainly raised questions for others – about who, exactly, will be working among the stars, and under what conditions.
To explore these questions, I spoke this week with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, which director Daniel Kwan used as research for the award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” More recently, she’s been examining the ethics of space expansion.
Rubenstein’s response to Bruey’s prediction cuts to a fundamental issue – which is power imbalance.”Workers already have a hard enough time on Earth paying their bills and keeping themselves safe . . . and insured,” she told me. “And that dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when one is dependent on one’s employer not just for a paycheck and sometim …