Why Big Tech Must Shift from Data Extraction to Cosmic Exploration for the Survival and Prosperity of Humanity
Imagine a world where Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, X and Apple—the titans of our digital age—stopped mining your private conversations, search history, and emotional vulnerabilities for profit. Instead, picture them redirecting their vast capital, artificial intelligence, and engineering genius toward the stars. What if their mission wasn’t to predict your next purchase, but to harvest solar energy from orbit, mine asteroids for rare minerals, and build the infrastructure for humanity’s next great leap—into space?
This is a viable, urgent, and morally necessary pivot—one that could redefine prosperity, heal our planet, and realign technology with human dignity.
The Cost of Surveillance: A World Built on Exploitation
Right now, the business model of big tech is rooted in surveillance capitalism—a system where your attention, behavior, and even subconscious patterns are extracted, analyzed, and monetized. Every word you type, every video you pause on, every late-night search is logged, cross-referenced, and used to build a predictive model of who you are and what you’ll do.
This comes at a profound cost:
- Privacy erosion: Personal data is no longer truly personal. From health queries to private messages, tech companies possess intimate knowledge of billions of people—with limited accountability.
- Algorithmic manipulation: Social media platforms use AI to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, maximizing engagement through outrage, comparison, and addiction. These algorithms are engineered to keep you scrolling, not thinking.
- Mental health crisis: Studies consistently link heavy social media use—especially among teens—to increased rates of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. One study found that adolescents spending over three hours daily on social media face twice the risk of poor mental health outcomes.
- Bias and discrimination: Data-driven algorithms often reflect and amplify societal inequalities, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, lending, and law enforcement.
- Erosion of democracy: Filter bubbles and misinformation, amplified by engagement-driven algorithms, deepen societal polarization and undermine trust in institutions.
In short, we are trading our autonomy, well-being, and collective future for free apps and targeted ads. And the companies profiting from this system are becoming more powerful than many nations.
This is not innovation. It is extraction—a digital gold rush where the resource being mined is human attention and identity.
The Alternative: A New Frontier of Abundance
Now, imagine redirecting that same energy—financial, technological, and intellectual—toward space exploration and sustainable energy harvesting. The universe is not a threat. It is the ultimate reservoir of clean energy, rare materials, and scientific discovery.
1. Space-Based Solar Power: Limitless Clean Energy
One of the most promising technologies on the horizon is space-based solar power (SBSP)—the concept of collecting solar energy in orbit, where sunlight is uninterrupted by weather or night, and beaming it wirelessly to Earth.
- Unlike ground-based solar, SBSP can provide 24/7 baseload power, unaffected by clouds or seasons.
- A single large solar satellite could generate 2,000 gigawatts of continuous power—enough to power millions of homes.
- This energy could be transmitted to remote areas, disaster zones, or used to power carbon capture systems, directly combating climate change.
NASA and global agencies are already studying SBSP as a viable solution for the future. If companies like Amazon or Google invested just a fraction of their data center budgets into this technology, we could see pilot systems within a decade.
2. Asteroid Mining: Ending Resource Scarcity on Earth
Earth’s supply of rare earth elements, platinum, cobalt, and water is finite—and their extraction is environmentally devastating. But in space, the abundance is staggering.
- A single metal-rich asteroid could contain trillions of dollars’ worth of platinum, gold, and nickel.
- Water-rich asteroids could provide fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) and life support for space missions, enabling long-term human presence in orbit, on the Moon, or Mars.
- Mining in space reduces the need for destructive mining on Earth, offering potential environmental benefits by preserving ecosystems and reducing pollution.
NASA’s Robotic Asteroid Prospector (RAP) project has already mapped feasible missions. With Starship and other reusable rockets maturing, the logistics are becoming viable.
3. Economic Renaissance: Jobs, Innovation, and Growth
Critics argue that space is too expensive. But history proves otherwise.
- NASA’s $75.6 billion budget in 2023 generated over $71.2 billion in economic impact, supporting high-paying jobs in all 50 U.S. states.
- Every dollar invested in space exploration has historically returned $7–$14 in economic growth.
- The space economy grew faster than the overall U.S. economy in 2019, with real output increasing by 2.2% versus 1.9%.
- New industries—space tourism, in-orbit manufacturing, satellite servicing—are emerging. The space tourism market alone could reach $4–6 billion annually by 2030.
Imagine if Meta’s $30 billion annual R&D budget was split between AI for climate modeling and spacecraft autonomy. Or if Apple’s $20 billion in annual patents included breakthroughs in lightweight solar arrays or closed-loop life support systems.
We wouldn’t just get new gadgets. We’d get a new civilization.
The Moral Imperative: From Fear to Flourishing
Our current narrative is dominated by fear—of surveillance, of AI, of loss of control. We speak of “digital prisons,” “data harvesting,” and “algorithmic manipulation.” These are real threats. But they are symptoms of a deeper problem: we have aimed too low.
We have focused our greatest minds on predicting human behavior—not elevating it.
What if, instead, we spoke of friends, not filters? Of kindness, not clicks? Of heaven, not hype?
The universe offers a vision of abundance, wonder, and unity. When astronauts look back at Earth from orbit, they report a profound shift in consciousness—the “overview effect”—a sense that borders are imaginary and that we are all crewmates on a fragile spaceship.
This is the perspective we need.
- Genuine prosperity is not measured in quarterly profits or user engagement. It is measured in clean air, shared knowledge, and collective purpose.
- True innovation doesn’t exploit human weakness. It overcomes physical limits—like gravity, distance, and scarcity.
- Real power is not in knowing what someone will buy. It is in knowing how to power a city with sunlight from space.
A Call to Action: Redefining the Mission of Technology
To the leaders of big tech: you have already changed the world. Now, change it again—for the better.
- Redirect 10% of your data-harvesting infrastructure toward space-based energy projects.
- Fund open-source AI to simulate asteroid trajectories, optimize solar transmission, and model climate solutions.
- Partner with NASA, ESA, and startups to build public-private missions that benefit all humanity—not just shareholders.
- Advocate for ethical data use, transparency, and digital rights—while investing in technologies that expand human freedom, not constrain it.
And to all of us: demand more. Refuse to be a data point. Become a co-creator of the future.
Let’s stop building algorithms that divide us and start building rockets that unite us.
Let’s harvest starlight, not sorrow.
Because the universe isn’t watching us.
It’s waiting for us—to grow up, look up, and finally become who we were meant to be.