When Space (X) Becomes More Valuable Than Earth

In the playground of ideas and Substack essays that the Reading Riot book group has generated from our pick, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, I jump from Scott’s description of how eighteenth-century governments stripped down their idea of a forest from a living ecosystem to a timber farm, to…space, of course.

Why? Because, as the Star Trek opening goes, space is the next frontier, both for adventure and where the trajectory (and survival?) of Earth and humanity will be decided.

In eighteenth-century Germany, the forest commons was a vast frontier. For the people it supported, it was a wildlife habitat, watershed, food source, grazing ground, pharmacy, gathering place, and a common resource generally referred to as a commons.

The government didn’t see this forest commons as a critical resource for the people who utilized it. They saw timber as a single, exploitable resource to be controlled and monetized. Officials counted the harvestable trees, calculated their yield, cleared old-growth ecosystems to plant orderly rows of commercially valuable trees, and reorganized forests to maximize revenue.

The first monoculture forests appeared successful because they inherited the rich soil created by the old-growth forests they destroyed. Over time, monoculture brought disease, depleted soil, declining yields, and an ecologically brittle landscape that German foresters eventually called forest death.

This forest death came directly from the state narrowing the forest’s vast value to the product of harvestable timber. Erased from this new value were the incalculables of wildlife habitat, watershed, food source, grazing ground, pharmacy, gathering place, and the common resource that supported the well-being of people, animals, and the natural world. These incalculables weren't (presumably) ignored out of spite, but because they were deemed too unimportant to count.

This old story has played out over and over, leading to today’s commercial monoculture forests burning in Canada, indigenous populations of Amazonia crowded out and even slaughtered for oil access, and the great Amazon rainforest slashed and burned for cattle and minerals until it has shifted from a carbon sink to a carbon source. We’ve gotten so used to it, and the storyline so ingrained (we need oil, minerals, meat, and profitable, productive land) that most people just tune it out or consider it the price of “civilization.”

I hope that considering what the jump to a space economy might do will be a wake-up call.

Space as the next frontier is likely to recalculate the value of Earth as merely a resource farm and ignore Earth’s incalculable value to those of us who call it home.

If you’re shocked, don’t be. It’s an obvious future step if we cede our destiny to the current iteration of the profit and power systems that run our world.

On January 25, 2026, while defending SpaceX’s valuation (which exceeded that of six major U.S. defense companies combined), Musk wrote on X, “Space-based industries will vastly exceed the value of all of Earth, given that you could harness roughly 100,000 times more energy than Earth and still be using less than a millionth of the Sun’s energy!”

On July 9, 2026, in a discussion about AI-computing costs and an arrangement between SpaceX and Anthropic, Musk wrote on X, “You don’t seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”

Musk presumably didn’t mean that SpaceX would become more valuable than Earth in a meaningful human sense. Earth is our home. It contains our atmosphere, water, soil, languages, histories, relationships, species, cultures, and every living human being, as well as nearly everything we have ever loved, created, inherited, or known.

He’s stating value from a financial perspective—through the lend of assets, expected profits, market position, intellectual property, future income, and control over scarce infrastructure.

The same perspective as the German government officials viewed the forest.

From the view of the space-based economy, if our systems churn along with the same objectives and incentives, Earth becomes Scott’s next forest.

We’ve had a taste of this with the AI rollout, where the whole of human creativity is pillaged for dataset training and sold back to us through tokens that feed a profit mechanism benefiting the very few. Where each of us subsidizes the AI buildout through higher power bills, depleted water supplies, and, in some cases, dry residential taps. Where the marketing glam espouses AI as a boon for humanity, while ignoring the human cost of lost jobs, automated insurance and other rejections, mistaken IDs that land people in prison, and much more.

As a cautionary tale, AI is a terrestrial industry with easier-to-see costs and benefits, and yet, instead of reigning it in to actually “benefit humanity,” those in power hit the gas pedal to build it out at all costs. Once space becomes the new frontier of extraordinary projected wealth, Earth will be reorganized around supplying it, essentially “owning” Earth the way a strip-mining corporation owns a company town.

Unless we change the system. And fast.

The mythology of the rugged individualist, the solo entrepreneur, or the emerging AI, tech, or space visionary is so much drivel. It imagines a singular visionary dreaming bigger than everyone else, risking everything to build the future. The moral of this fairy tale is that he (always a he, if you haven’t noticed) deserves the sole reward.

But no individual or private company creates anything alone, especially when it comes to getting to space or building out the space economy.

SpaceX (and Tesla, AI, and tech companies generally) rely heavily on public investment, paid for with taxes. NASA research, military technology, publicly educated engineers, government launch facilities, national communications systems, regulatory institutions, and decades of scientific discovery supply the foundation for all tech, biotech, space-related, and many other so-called private ventures. Musk’s companies (among many others) have also received support through government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax benefits valued by a 2025 Washington Post analysis at no less than $38 billion of public money.

This isn’t to say that a visionary doesn’t deserve to benefit from his (or her!) accomplishments or innovations. But does it deserve to own them, when the foundation of so much of it was provided by decades of publicly-funded research and infrastructure?

Why is this even a question? Because our current financialized system of power and profit has been shifting the rules as they race to place a new wave of winning bets like the president’s teleprompter operator on Polymarket.

But do the rest of us want a guy who leveraged everything (including the world’s financial system, outcome TBD) to control a rocket company to be the sole proprietor of humanity’s relationship with the universe?

I raise my hand for “no.”

In a previous reality where space exploration was the purview of governments rather than corporations, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared that exploration and use of space should benefit all countries and that celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation. It also made nations responsible for supervising the activities of their private companies. Ah, the olden days!

In a climate of no-hold-barred racing for control of Earth, AI, and space, there is little appetite to use government power to craft a common-good future. Not when private, global companies possess more technical capacity than most nations, operate essential communications infrastructure, control access to orbit, and negotiate directly with governments.

A country can’t declare the Moon its sovereign territory (for now) but some national laws now recognize private rights to resources extracted in space—begging the question of whether space is a shared domain or can be claimed by a private commercial enterprise. Who decides whether the Moon is legally considered a scientific archive, a sacred presence, a military position, a mining zone, or real estate like some cosmic timeshare venture?

Who has the right to mine an asteroid and for whose benefit? Who speaks for Earth and Earth’s inhabitants when it comes to our collective reach into space? Who speaks for nations that cannot afford space programs? Who protects a celestial body from contamination or destruction?

I’ll let my spec-fi mind run free, I’d also ask: who owns, or controls, or controls access to, what humanity encounters in space?

And who speaks for future generations and Earth’s nonhuman life, both of which are already profoundly affected by the decisions we make, but with no voice to participate in the decisions?

Let’s really ask the question: Should the first entity capable of reaching a resource be able to claim it as their own? Because we’ve had a pretty bad track record when it comes to the principle of “first discovery,” when so-called “inhabited lands” were declared empty, then developed by claiming communal resources as private property by those who preached the benefits of progress as they sacrificed and erased the people who bore the greatest costs.

Honestly, I think humanity going into space is fabulous and that space should be our next great collective frontier, but not if we let our current financialized profit and power system design this future for their own spoils.

A space economy organized around profit and strategic dominance will see both space and Earth as calculable mineral deposits, orbital positions, data capacity, military advantage, patent portfolios, resource rights, and projected revenue. It won’t see cultural meaning, ecological limits, shared inheritance, democratic legitimacy, or the rights of people who lack purchasing power.

In another generation, those vested in the space economy may not even see Earth as home. Earth may be a quaint terrestrial outpost that serves as a launch platform, labor pool, supply depot, consumer market, and source of investment capital.

As we saw with Scott’s forest example, a whole forest ecosystem reduced to a timber venture eventually ceased to function even as a timber producer.

What happens when Earth is reduced to the support system for a space economy?

The rules of the space economy are not set in stone. They are choices being made now through contracts, treaties, licensing systems, public investment, corporate structures, and destructive, out-of-date stories about who deserves to control humanity’s future.

We don’t have to choose between innovation and shared benefit. But if we want a different trajectory than the winner-take-all system that will turn Earth into a resource farm, we have to decide whether humanity’s next great leap will repeat the old pattern of publicly building the road, privatizing the destination, and letting the public absorb the financial, ecological, and other costs.

Before one company becomes “worth more than the rest of Earth,” we should ask what has been excluded from that calculation, and whose land, labor, knowledge, and future will be sacrificed to finance it.

The challenge isn’t to reach space. We’re well on the way. The challenge is to make humanity and Earth the primary beneficiaries of our expansion into space rather than making Earth—and most of the people on it—disappear from the beneficiary side of the ledger.

Peace, Kristine

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