Let me make an argument that will annoy approximately everyone I know.

The entities currently capable of getting humanity off this planet and establishing a presence elsewhere in the solar system are private companies operating under governance frameworks that are, to be charitable, early-stage. Their leadership holds views about democracy, labor, and the role of the state that range from eccentric to actively hostile to human welfare. Their accountability to the public is, to a first approximation, whatever their investors and the current NASA administrator require of them, which, given the current administrator's documented financial ties to the primary landing contractor, is a number that hasn't been tested.

And I think we probably should let them proceed. Not because they deserve to. Because the alternative is worse.

The Basic Problem

The species is on one planet. One planet. A single sufficiently large impactor (and the solar system contains many) ends the experiment. A runaway climate feedback loop that crosses the wrong threshold ends the experiment. An engineered pathogen released by a state actor, a terrorist, a well-meaning researcher whose biosafety protocol was not quite good enough ends the experiment. A nuclear exchange between two powers that have been locked in a slow-motion strategic competition for decades ends at minimum a substantial fraction of the experiment and likely the rest shortly thereafter.

These aren't science fiction scenarios. The impactor question is statistics over long timescales. The rest are happening in some form right now, with varying degrees of severity. The point is not that any of these is likely in the next decade... it's that the expected cost of keeping the entire species on one planet, calculated over centuries, is extinction. The only question is the timeline.

Diversification is the response to catastrophic correlated risk. Every investor, every engineer, every ecologist who has thought about resilience arrives at the same structural answer: do not keep all your eggs in one basket, especially when the basket is a third-generation star orbiting in a galaxy full of things that kill baskets. Expanding the species beyond Earth isn't colonialism projected into space. It's catastrophic risk diversification at the species level. The terms are different. The logic is different. The math is the same.

The Uncomfortable Part

The entities doing this expansion are not the United Nations... not some enlightened international consortium of scientists and philosophers negotiating carefully over the rights and resources of all humanity. They're SpaceX, Blue Origin, ispace, and a rotating cast of venture-backed startups burning through capital at rates that would make a Gilded Age railroad baron comfortable and an antitrust lawyer nervous. The first interplanetary government may well be a holding company registered in Delaware with a board of directors accountable to investors, operating in the absence of any public framework that sets conditions on access, pricing, or benefit-sharing.

This is genuinely bad. The enclosure of space resources without meaningful international governance creates a template for concentration of wealth and power that makes current inequality look modest. The first entity to establish reliable propellant production at the lunar south pole controls the economics of everything beyond it. That is not an exaggeration. The refueling depot that sits between Earth and Mars is a toll booth on the road to the solar system.

I am not dismissing this. It's a serious concern that deserves serious political attention.

The Counter-Argument I Take Seriously

The version of the opposing argument that I can't dismiss is this one: expansion as pressure release valve. The powerful have always treated the frontier as a reason not to fix the society they left behind. The Americas were not settled by people who fixed feudal Europe first. Australia was not settled by people who fixed the British class system first. The Moon will not be settled by people who fixed climate change, inequality, or democratic backsliding first. If anything, the existence of a new frontier gives the powerful another argument for why the problems here are someone else's problem, why the resources that might go toward climate adaptation should instead go toward rocket fuel, why the people being left behind on an increasingly difficult planet should look up at the sky and feel inspired.

This argument has real historical weight. It is not crazy.

Why I Land Where I Land

Here's the thing about the Mayflower: it wasn't a democratic institution. The Pilgrims were religious separatists fleeing a state that found them inconvenient. Their financial backers were London merchants who wanted a return on their investment. The governance structure of Plymouth Colony wasn't designed with the rights of the Wampanoag in mind. It was, by any modern standard, an extractive colonial project with a religious justification.

And yet here we are, three centuries later, debating this in a language and a political framework that emerged in part from that messy, compromised, violent, and deeply imperfect expansion. I am not saying that justifies the harm. I am saying that the presence of bad actors doing a thing doesn't automatically make the thing itself bad.

The species needs redundancy. It needs presence in more than one gravity well. The window to establish that presence, before either catastrophic failure or the concentration of enough power in too few hands to make the governance question irrelevant, isn't indefinitely long.

The choice we actually face isn't between corporate space expansion and some cleaner version run by better people. The cleaner version is not on offer. The choice is between corporate space expansion with contested governance, fractious norms, and real risks of enclosure, and staying on one fragile planet while we wait for better circumstances that may not arrive.

The governance is a disaster. The incentives are misaligned. The people in charge of the rockets have said things about democracy that should concern anyone paying attention.

Let them build the refueling depot anyway. Then fight like hell over who owns it.

That is not a satisfying conclusion. The truth usually is not.

Editor-in-Chief has opinions. Sources them.