Before you start labeling me as an idiot for not looking at the big picture (which according to me, doesn’t exist), just hear me out. My problem is not with the stuff that they did. What they did is an engineering marvel. Being an engineer myself, I know how much effort, hard work and all the innovation was put into the project. My main problem lies with the motive for which it was done. This is one of the stepping stones for future colonization of other planets, maybe Mars, which I really hope doesn’t happen.
As quoted by Andrew Griffin at "Independent," “Watching live streams of an electric car floating in space, while the boosters that carried it there softly land themselves back on Earth, it’s hard not to feel that we’re living in the future.” If this is how future is going to be, like the past, where people had nothing better to do than looking for new areas to colonize and inevitably destroy the pristine nature, I would say, history does repeat itself. The only difference in this history being repeated is, it is done by sophisticated machines with humongous power. Instead of finding ways to improve the current situation on our planet we are trying to colonize another planet to make it like just like ours. Home (not so) sweet home. With people in this people not knowing about what global warming is to people thinking about making a planet habitable (read destroying it), future does look pretty good.
Who doesn’t like space? I do. It’s beautiful. So is the blue whale. That doesn’t mean that I have to eat or kill one. I can just admire it, right? The same thing goes for the heavy bodies in our galaxy. Admire it. Study it. Do whatever you want to do with it. Just don’t make a mess of it like we have made on our home planet. And yes, did you know electric cars are called electric cars because they run on our stored electrical energy? Electrical energy is produced from fossil fuels. So no thanks to you for giving an excuse for saving the environment while buying one.
You may say I am a cynic and I am losing the focus on the big picture, which is to accommodate our (ever-growing) species. Of course, you may argue with the fact that there is no life on Mars and we can do whatever we want to do with it. But the important thing to remember is that it is not ours. The biggest problem with the human being is not knowing when they have crossed the boundaries of sanity.
And yes, I do know how difficult it is to make another planet “liveable” for our species, which is the only thing I am really happy about. But well, we have already made the space near our earth full of “space debris”. It is the term used for “useless” satellites, space rocket residues which keep floating in the space. I don’t think it’s very difficult to make a planet look like this.
PS: I thought about checking the mission statement of SpaceX and it specifically has a line stating, "..with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets." I definitely want to give up on humanity, right now.