Space Travel & Our Place in the Cosmos
Awe at the scale of the universe is a deeply Jewish and Christian instinct. So is the prophetic question: who does this serve? When billionaires race to build escape rockets while the planet burns and people go hungry, the tradition has something to say about that too.
The Answer
The Psalmist looked up at the night sky and wrote: "The heavens declare the glory of God." (Psalm 19:1) He had no idea how right he was. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, 93 billion light-years across, and contains more stars than grains of sand on every beach on Earth. The tradition's response to all of this is not anxiety — it is awe. That awe is appropriate, important, and worth protecting.
But the tradition also asks a second question, one the prophets asked about every human enterprise: who does this serve?
Right now, the wealthiest individuals in human history are spending billions of dollars on private rocket companies — not primarily to advance scientific knowledge, but to build infrastructure for themselves and paying customers. The vision animating the most prominent of these projects is explicitly about making humanity "multi-planetary" — establishing colonies on Mars as a hedge against extinction events on Earth. The Earth being the planet that currently contains eight billion people, the majority of whom cannot access clean water, adequate nutrition, basic healthcare, or shelter.
Let's be direct about what this vision entails: a small number of extremely wealthy people building an escape route, while the world they are leaving behind continues to suffer from the consequences of the economic system that made them wealthy in the first place.
If you wanted to design a scenario that Jesus would find troubling, that might be it.
Not the science. Not the curiosity. Not the telescopes or the probes or the search for understanding. The tradition has always celebrated those. The Vatican has been doing astronomy for four centuries. The Psalmist was already doing it three thousand years ago. Wonder at the cosmos is a form of worship.
What the tradition does not celebrate is the use of vast accumulated wealth to build a lifeboat for the comfortable while the world burns. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) does not end with the rich man building a rocket. It ends with him in torment — not because he was cruel to Lazarus, but because he was indifferent to him. The suffering was at his gate and he looked past it.
Jesus, who spent his entire ministry among the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the displaced — Jesus who said "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me" — would not have been on that rocket. He would have been with the people left behind. And the question the tradition asks is: why are we building the rocket instead of fixing the gate?
The Jewish Reformer's Lens
The Hebrew concept of tikkun olam — "repair of the world" — is among the most well-known phrases in Jewish ethics. Its Kabbalistic origins describe the work of gathering scattered divine sparks back into wholeness. Its practical application is simpler and more demanding: the world as it is is broken, and human beings bear responsibility for fixing it.
The word olam means "world" — the world we are already in. Not a future world on another planet. Not an escape from this one. The obligation of tikkun olam is precisely to this damaged, beloved, specific world — with its specific hungry people, its specific polluted rivers, its specific displaced families.
The Torah's law of Bal Tashchit — do not destroy — is rooted in the prohibition on cutting down fruit trees during a siege. The rabbis extended it into a general principle: needlessly destroying what sustains life is a violation of the divine order. The systematic pollution of the atmosphere, the acidification of the oceans, and the destabilization of the climate system that makes agriculture possible — and then building a rocket to escape the consequences — is Bal Tashchit on a civilizational scale.
The prophetic tradition is clear on where God's attention is directed when resources are misallocated. Amos did not say "I hate your festivals" because the Israelites had stopped performing them. He said it because they were performing them lavishly while the poor were being exploited at the city gates. The category error was the same: using wealth on elaborate projects while the suffering at your doorstep goes unaddressed.
Scientific curiosity, astronomical observation, the search for knowledge about the cosmos — these are celebrated in the tradition. Maimonides wrote that studying the natural world is a form of loving God. But there is a difference between curiosity and escapism, between scientific inquiry and a hedge fund for the apocalypse.
Catholic Social Teaching
The Catholic Church operates the Vatican Observatory and has employed serious astronomers for centuries. The tradition has no objection to space science. The Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin developed a theology that embraces the full cosmic scale of creation as part of the story of God's love. None of this is in tension with the prophetic critique of billionaire space programs.
What is in tension with Catholic Social Teaching is the specific vision of space colonization as a private escape route for the wealthy — built by corporations accountable to shareholders, priced for the affluent, and premised on the implicit acceptance that the Earth may become uninhabitable for most of its population.
The principle of the Universal Destination of Goods — that the goods of creation are meant for all people, not for private accumulation — applies to the Earth itself. Laudato Si' (2015) frames the environmental crisis explicitly as a justice crisis: "The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor." The same logic extends to the question of who gets to leave if she becomes unlivable.
Pope Francis has been direct about the moral problem with the ultra-wealthy using their resources for vanity projects while poverty persists. In Laudate Deum (2023), he writes: "It is no longer possible to doubt the human — 'anthropic' — origin of climate change... Some symptoms indicate that we have already reached a breaking point... we need not just superficial or apparent measures, but effective ones." The effective measure is not a Mars colony. It is the repair of this planet.
The Church's tradition of solidarity — the conviction that we are all responsible for one another, that the suffering of one is the concern of all — stands in direct opposition to a lifeboat ethic. A Christianity that accepts the premise that some people will be saved from a broken Earth and others left behind has stopped being Christianity and started being something else.
The Vatican Observatory, for its part, does astronomy to understand creation — not to escape it.
Sources & Citations
- Psalm 19:1–4 — The Heavens Declare (Hebrew Bible) One of the Psalms of David. The cosmos as continuous, wordless revelation: "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." The tradition has always understood the natural world as a secondary form of revelation alongside Scripture. Scientific wonder at the universe is a form of that same encounter — not a threat to faith but an extension of it.
- Luke 16:19–31 — The Rich Man and Lazarus (New Testament) One of the four Gospels. A wealthy man lives in luxury while a beggar named Lazarus suffers at his gate. Both die. The rich man ends in torment; Lazarus is comforted. Crucially, the rich man's sin is never named — he is not described as cruel or fraudulent. He is simply described as having lived comfortably while suffering was visible at his doorstep. The indifference to proximate need, not the enjoyment of wealth per se, appears to be the indictment.
- Matthew 25:31–46 — The Judgment of the Nations (New Testament) One of the four Gospels. The final judgment turns entirely on one question: how did you treat the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned? "Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." The test is material and immediate — not eschatological aspiration but present-tense attention to the suffering person in front of you.
- Pope Francis, Laudato Si' (2015), §§49, 161 Papal encyclical on the environment. §49: "The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor." §161: "Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet's capacity that our contemporary lifestyle... can only precipitate catastrophes." The tradition's response to planetary crisis is repair, not departure.
- Deuteronomy 20:19–20 — Bal Tashchit (Hebrew Bible) The Torah. The prohibition on destroying fruit trees during a military siege — the source of the rabbinic principle of *Bal Tashchit* (do not destroy). Extended by the rabbis to a general prohibition on needlessly destroying what sustains life. Applied at civilizational scale: an economic system that burns through natural systems faster than they can regenerate, and whose beneficiaries then fund escape projects rather than repair, violates the deepest logic of this principle.
- Amos 5:21–24 — Justice Over Ceremony (Hebrew Bible) One of the Twelve Minor Prophets. God rejects elaborate worship that coexists with injustice. The structure of the critique is relevant here: it is not the festivals themselves that are condemned, but the use of lavish resources on celebrations of divine favor while the poor are exploited at the city gate. The prophetic critique of space tourism and colonization follows the same logic: it is not science or curiosity that is condemned, but the expenditure of enormous resources on elite projects while proximate human suffering goes unaddressed.
What Should We Do?
For everyone: Hold two things at once. The cosmos is staggeringly beautiful and worth understanding — the James Webb Space Telescope images of galaxies formed 300 million years after the Big Bang are genuinely among the most awe-inspiring things humans have ever seen, and that awe is a form of prayer. At the same time: the first obligation is to this world, to the people already here, to the systems already failing.
Ask the prophetic question about every major expenditure of human resources: who does this serve? Publicly funded space science — NASA, ESA, the James Webb Telescope — serves everyone. It advances human knowledge, produces technologies with broad civilian application, and belongs to the commons. Privately funded rockets designed to take paying customers on joyrides, or to build colonies accessible only to the ultra-wealthy, serve a very different set of interests.
The lifeboat ethic — the idea that a small number of people can build an escape from a civilization they helped break — is not compatible with any serious reading of the tradition. The tradition does not offer an exit. It offers a task: repair this world, care for these people, fix this gate. Jesus didn't leave when things got bad. He went deeper in.
For Catholics specifically: Laudato Si' and Laudate Deum together make the strongest case in the history of Catholic Social Teaching for treating the Earth as a moral priority — not a resource to extract from until it's exhausted, and not a problem to escape from when that extraction has done its damage. Your faith tradition has a 400-year history of serious astronomy conducted in the spirit of reverence for creation. That spirit asks: what are we doing with what God made? The answer the tradition requires is stewardship, repair, and presence — not departure.