I saw an interesting new show on HBO on Friday night, hosted by actor / comedian Wyatt Cenac, and it’s called Troubled Areas. In the Cenac program, he examines quite a few social and cultural issues that we face here in America. The program has the potential to be a breakthrough, especially in the current climate our country is facing. Cenac offers a food approach to thinking about topics rather than standing on a preachy soap box.

I’m going to focus on a particular theme in this episode.

At last night’s premiere, one of the topics he addressed was billionaires and space exploration. He made a point about billionaires who are suddenly interested in leaving Earth and going into space.

When you bring up the topic of billionaires and space exploration, I suppose you have to highlight Elon Musk. Cenac notes that Elon’s search for space exploration could be considered problematic due to the fact, in his opinion, that Elon is also from South Africa. He jokingly said that his comments might be considered racist, but so was apartheid.

As Cenac continued, he mentioned Musk’s recent launch of his Tesla roadster into orbit.

These comments surprised me a bit, but honestly, they got me thinking. Was Cenac saying that the fact that Musk is South African is somehow responsible for the ills of apartheid and therefore not qualified to participate in an evolutionary step for humanity? I have a serious problem with that assumption. But maybe, since Cenac is a comedian, he was making a joke, but his comment seemed slightly serious.

To be fair, he did talk about Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and one or two others, but he spent most of his comments in this segment focusing on Musk.

The entire segment of billionaires in space alluded to the fact that men of great wealth simply want to leave the planet they ruined without providing a solution and leave us commoners behind. There is a big problem with that theory. Unless there is a secret planet in our own solar system that is habitable and all it takes is a quick rocket ride to get there, Cenac’s message does not hold up at that point.

Currently none of us can get into a 737 or a Cessna and leave Earth’s atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy, staff, and capital to get to space, especially if you want to go to a certain destination like a space station. We would have to be in the Star Trek era for something like that.

For him to suggest that billionaires are trying to escape a planet that ruined them, then these guys have a rude awakening ahead of them. Without commoners on earth there is no infrastructure, no base of operations, and some rich guys are not going to have any kind of structured survival.

The bottom line is that space travel requires a lot of people and capital to get into orbit, which means that one has to be a country and a people with the means to achieve this endeavor. If these guys are willing to put up the capital to take us on space travel, so be it. No more argument about wasting tax dollars.