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Publication date: 16 July 2024

Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, Munish Thakur and Payal Kumar

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue…

Abstract

Executive Summary

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

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A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83753-346-6

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