“Elon Musk is one of the most dangerous people on the planet.”

“Elon Musk is not just a space polluter (…), he is one of the most dangerous people on the planet,” says Big Five theoretical astronomy professor Vincent Icke at BNR. Ike is particularly upset by Musk's call to have many children. “There are actually eight billion of them. There is no shortage of resources on this planet at all, there are simply too many people.

Ike is also not happy about the race between countries to be the first to put a human on the moon again. He does not see the logic in this: “For me as a scientific researcher, this is a big mystery.” If you send people there, it makes no sense at all. Man has no business at all in space. According to Ike, the benefits do not outweigh the effort, costs and energy required to make a large rocket travel 380,000 km.

BNR Big Five | Listen to the entire conversation

Scientific research should ideally be done using instruments, the astronomer says. Therefore, it is better to send instruments to the moon. “I weigh 72 kilograms, wouldn’t it be absurd to send that into space?” I'd rather have 72kg of good tools. My family also wants it much more. For Ike, racing is primarily a matter of prestige and a display of science. He also does not see any military use in it.

Offense

Icke believes space is being misused. This is explained by the huge number of satellites that we put in orbit around the Earth, and the way to do this and how to exploit it. “You're literally putting tens of thousands of these things into low Earth orbit.” Not only do telescopic observations from Earth suffer greatly from this, but they also become very crowded.

According to Ek, the problem is not the size of the satellite (the size of a refrigerator), “but such an object is in orbit around the Earth, so this small object occupies this entire orbit.” And the space fills up quickly. Not as in: dots all around the Earth, but rather “a very large bundle of wool threads stretching across the Earth.” “This is so stupid.”

Read also | The first non-American set foot on the moon before the end of this decade

Baboon

Before Elon Musk sent his communications satellites into space, there were already communications satellites, Icke says. But there have not been many international agreements concluded on this subject either. “Elon Musk is not just a space polluter (…), he is one of the most dangerous people on the planet.”

Not only is he dangerous, Judges Icke, but he's also disturbed. He finds Musk's call to have more children particularly disturbing. “There are actually eight billion of them. There is no shortage of resources on this planet at all, there are simply too many people. When he says, ‘We all have to reproduce well,’ I think: What kind of baboon are we talking about here?”