Capitalism requires endless expansion to live.

So they need to feed the beast, and they're now planning to feed the moon to the beast.

They're now planning to feed Mars to the beast.

They're now planning to feed whatever asteroid they can get their hands on to the beast.

Music Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have a fantastic conversation with

Chanda Prescott Weinstein. Chanda is the author of The Disordered Cosmos, a journey into dark matter,

space time, and dreams deferred. She's also an assistant professor of physics and core faculty

member in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She's also a columnist

at New Scientist and Physics World. As Elon Musk and these

other billionaires, and not to mention, governments like in the United States and other parts of the

world, keep pushing this vision of a privatized and commercialized future for space, we need to push

back against those visions and think critically about what they mean for us as the people of the world,

but also what it means for our future relationship to space. We recently saw the release of new images from the James Webb Space

Telescope, or as Chonda calls it, the Just Wonderful Space Telescope, recognizing that James Webb

was involved in the firing and discrimination against queer employees of NASA in the

1950s, and someone like that should not be honored by having a space telescope named after them.

There seemed to be a renewed excitement in a different kind of space, not so much the colonization of

Mars, but what we can learn from admittedly these beautiful images that the space telescope provided to us.

I thought that was a good opportunity to have a deeper, critical conversation with Chanda

about these developments, about how we think about the space program, about our relationship

to space and where these companies and governments are driving us, and also why we need to push

back against that and to think about a different relationship to space and how we can learn from

...