If you’ve heard the news about SpaceX, you know Musk’s ambitions are proving to be, well, ambitious. Recently, President Obama published an op-ed on CNN calling for not only travel to Mars, but the eventual settlement of our civilization on the planet as well. CEO Elon Musk would naturally be ecstatic about this presidential decree, considering that only two weeks prior to the President writing this op-ed, he and his team released a presentation on the topic (Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species). Musk wants to build a city, and he appears to have a plan for it:

He admits in his presentation, ‘it’s a bit tricky’. He says he needs to improve the cost of travelling to mars by ‘500%’. In the hour long presentation, however, you acquire a trust and excitement about the potential Musk speaks about. We are enamoured with the ‘what could be’ of space travel. It certainly resembles the excitement of space travel that must have existed in the 60s when NASA manned the first human mission to the moon. Obama remembers the sense of awe the space program instilled within him as a child: “I still have the same sense of wonder about our space program that I did as a child. It represents an essential part of our character — curiosity and exploration, innovation and ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and doing it before anybody else. The space race we won not only contributed immeasurably important technological and medical advances, but it also inspired a new generation of scientists and engineers with the right stuff to keep America on the cutting edge.” There’s an important phrase in that excerpt, ‘pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and doing it before anybody else’. This may be more revealing about our intentions regarding space travel than we think.

I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast recently with Neil Degrasse Tyson. After some talk about conspiracy theories about the moon landing, Joe asked a very honest and legitimate question about space travel. To paraphrase, why is it that at a time when the most advanced computer was the size of a room, yielding the power equivalent to the electronic chip you’d find in a birthday card, was also the time we reached the zenith of our space aspirations? Virtually every aspect of our technological life, with the exponential distribution of powerful computing (in the form of phones) as well as access and development of the internet, has made enormously consequential progress in the last 13 years , yet we’ve made significantly small steps, by comparison, in trans-planetary travel considering the roughly 40 years since our last space endevour (perhaps aside from landing a rover on mars).

Tyson’s response left me in contemplation. The moon landing, perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement, was accomplished because we were at war. We felt a sense of urgency to travel to the moon because if we didn’t, Russia would have done it first. This is what resulted in a national refocusing towards Eisenhower’s NASA, exemplified by features of astronauts in TIME magazine, space expos, the generosity of sponsors etc. Once we did it, once we got to the moon, the scientists and engineers that naturally became enamoured with the ‘what could be’ were neglected by the greater public.

The fact is, innovation in our society is inextricably and invariably linked to our economic and security interests (which in effect, are one in the same). The reason why Donald Trump wants to bring manufacturing and technology jobs back to America is because he feels threatened by the technological dexterity of Asian countries like China and India. The reason why the GPS and the cell phone became available to the consumer is because it was developed by the military first. There’s a reason why some of our greatest technological achievements belong to the weapons industry. Just imagine for a second what could be possible if we had a economic or security threat in the field of medicine, education, artificial intelligence? Imagine how much national pride and support we could galvanize if science in general was backed by some level of economic or security objective. The thing is, it already is. It’s perhaps not immediate enough for public perception.

So, President Obama and Elon Musk, I am excited by your aspirations. I too hope one day the human species can be a multiplanetary one. I just hope human martians need not a profit motive, nor war, to serve as their reason to innovate.