I. Timaeus
When the ancient Greeks coined the word cosmos, I think they meant something rather grander than what we usually mean today. Plato describes κόσμος as an ordered world — the opposite of chaos. But he goes further. For him the cosmos is a living being with a body and a soul, not merely a dead machine. It is a reflection of the eternal world of the Ideas — an imperfect copy of a higher, invisible, and eternal order. It is structured through proportions, numbers and geometry; the movements of the heavens are an expression of rational order. And it is arranged in a certain hierarchy — reason governs the soul, just as cosmic reason governs the world.
It is in something of this spirit that I want to approach the question of space exploration. I shall use the Platonic form of dialogue, since I find that the question is too large to be answered in a single voice. The two voices in this essay are both mine, but they disagree.
The first I shall call the Poet. He hopes.
The other I shall call the Sceptic. He doubts.
There is also a third character in the room — my father. He simply listens, and most of the time he stays silent.
II. From Space to κόσμος
The Poet: For me, space is two things. The narrow notion stretches from the edge of the earth’s atmosphere to the farthest point that man has ever reached through the Voyager programme. But space in the meaning of κόσμος is something broader. It is, to a great extent, a synonym for fundamental science. It extends to every point of the Universe, studies its essence and its laws, but also includes our abstract thought and part of our dreams.
In what follows, I do not want to give a tour of the various space programmes. I want to ask, instead, a more uncomfortable question — how necessary is it, really, to invest effort and money in the development of fundamental science? Is the widening of the horizon of human knowledge a necessity for society, or is it merely the indulgence of an educated elite?
The Sceptic: I, for my part, associate space with flags planted in yet another patch of rock, with flamboyant plans for colonies on Mars, and with the billions thrown into ever larger rockets that will never carry anyone to the stars.
Meanwhile, children around the world are dying of hunger and disease, and the scientists at the universities, the ones who do the real work, cannot afford a new car.
The Poet: You are blunt. And on some of it, frighteningly right.
That is why I shall leave aside the everyday and the political, and try instead to speak of something timeless. I mean the human longing to uncover what is not yet known, and to understand both the universe and our place within it. I shall try to show that this longing is necessary. And you are to stop me when I go wrong.
Twelve centuries ago, in Baghdad, there ruled a caliph by the name of al-Maʼmūn. He was a religious zealot, and a persecutor of those who thought differently from him. Yet he is remembered for one thing in particular: he founded the House of Wisdom, a place where Greek, Persian and Indian texts were translated into Arabic, and where scholars of different faiths could work side by side. In this way he provided the soil, the sun and the rain in which a tree of knowledge might grow.
III. The Tree of Knowledge
Today the conditions for the growth of that tree are provided by rulers who go by rather more sober names — presidents, parliaments, ministries, research councils. And my thesis is one of the older ones, as old as history itself. A state that creates the conditions for the development of science is a state whose society, in the long run, flourishes. This is not my own guess. Vannevar Bush set it out as early as 1945, in Science: The Endless Frontier.
CERN may be the best example of all this. The laboratory was founded in 1954, with public money from twelve European states, with a single aim — to pursue the fundamental questions about the structure of matter. But alongside its main purpose, something strange came into being. In 1989, in an ordinary office, a young English physicist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee invented a way for his colleagues to exchange data more conveniently. The tool he made, intended only for internal use, is what we now call the World Wide Web.
The Sceptic: You speak of money without making it clear where the money comes from. The state’s treasury is not a bottomless well. For every pound that goes to science, something else has been deprived of it. Science eats up the money for a new hospital that would have treated thousands of poor people, who will now simply die. Science eats up the money for a new school that would have given children from the slums a chance not to end up in prison or in addiction. When the state takes money from the teacher, from the nurse, from the pensioner, in order to give it to a telescope, a rocket, or a quantum laboratory, what it is doing is a redistribution in the wrong direction — from the poor to the rich. The poor pay for the curiosity of the elite.
The Poet: Come now. Scientists in universities and laboratories can hardly be called the rich elite. Like the nurse and the pensioner, they too have a right to live with dignity. But I will grant you something else. Let me turn to Joel Mokyr, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2025. For thousands of years, he argues, civilisations rose and fell without their descendants living noticeably better than their ancestors. The sustained, cumulative growth that begins towards the end of the eighteenth century is the exception in human history, not the rule. What changed? According to Mokyr, one thing. Propositional knowledge — the abstract understanding of the laws behind phenomena — came into being. And once this understanding entered into a continuous conversation with practical skill, growth became self-sustaining.
Space exploration is perhaps the purest form of that conversation. Between the equation and the rocket engine, between celestial mechanics and the metal alloy, between general relativity and satellite navigation, there lies precisely the meeting of abstract knowledge and practical skill that makes a civilisation modern.
And that is why I cannot accept your argument about the wronging of the poor. A civilisation that ceases to sustain its fundamental science does not preserve its prosperity for long. It begins, slowly, to decline — at first without notice, then without stopping.
The Sceptic: Wait. I am not finished. There is injustice not only in the way the funds for science are allocated, but also in this — in who actually benefits more from the fruits of the progress that you say it brings.
Because those fruits, if we are being honest, end up where there is already prosperity, education and opportunity.
The Poet: The truth — if I am to be honest — is that I do not know exactly how the fruits of science are distributed. I know only that some of them do indeed become common. The World Wide Web did not stay the property of CERN. It is used today by adolescents in the poorest regions of Africa, who will never hear of Dr Berners-Lee. The polio vaccine of Jonas Salk was not patented. Salk was asked why, and answered with a question of his own: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When knowledge is public, its fruits, too, have a way of becoming public, regardless of who paid the cost.
The Sceptic: There is one more thing you are not saying, but which I will not pass over in silence. This whole debate, into which you throw yourself with such passion, has already been settled.
Public budgets for science are not growing — they are in real decline. The OECD reported a fall of 4.1% for 2024. The only thing growing within them is the military component. Demography in the developed countries will deepen this — pension systems, healthcare for an ageing population, interest on enormous debts — all of it will eat up the budgets over the next thirty years. Science is among the first to lose under pressure, because it has no voters who will take to the streets for it, or in defence of space exploration.
The Poet: You are right. The budgets really are falling, and I see no political force that will reverse this trend. The question rather is not whether the state will continue to fund fundamental science (which I shall not stop insisting), but whether it still makes sense for it to do so, when the private sector does the same thing more efficiently. I myself admit that SpaceX has done significantly better than NASA in developing reusable rockets and achieving a much lower cost per kilo delivered to orbit.
IV. Artificial Intelligence
The Sceptic: It is rare for us to agree, but here it seems we have exchanged roles. For my part, I will note that the private sector receives more money than it has ever had — but not for fundamental science. The money goes to AI infrastructure, to development work, to products. AI makes fundamental knowledge not unnecessary, but automatic. AlphaFold is no accident. The next five years will bring dozens of AlphaFolds — solutions to old scientific problems, which come not from universities but from companies that have the money for compute. A young scientist who writes a peer-reviewed paper a year solving one protein is economically displaced by a system that solves two hundred million proteins in six months.
The Poet: AI really does displace scientists who carry out monotonous, methodical, repeatable work. But you are confusing science with the scientific method. Artificial intelligence can follow the method — there it is faster and more tireless than people, it does not sleep, does not fall ill, does not make technical mistakes. But in its essence it remains what it is — a huge mathematical model, trained on existing knowledge and following statistical regularities.
Non-standard abstract thinking — the kind that widens the horizon of the cosmos, that sees a connection where statistics show nothing — is a distinguishing mark of the human race. For it to develop in the machine as well, the machine would need something like an inner life of its own. Many of today’s developers maintain that this is a matter of time, because the human self is not original either, but a product of growing up, of memory, of what psychology calls ‘self-forming actions’. Others, among them Roger Penrose, maintain the opposite — that human consciousness is not mathematically describable, that it belongs to a separate stratum of the cosmos that will never be touched by any machine.
I do not know who is right in this argument. But I would not put all my eggs in the basket that says AI will soon replace the universities. And even if it does replace them in part, someone still has to ask the questions. For now, that someone is us — human beings.
V. The End of the Argument
This argument between the Poet and the Sceptic could go on indefinitely, and I often wonder whether either of them will, in the end, win it convincingly. I do not know which of the two is closer to the truth. Perhaps both. Perhaps the truth, if there is one, lies somewhere in the middle — in that silence which settles into the room when both voices have spent themselves.
What then?
No one is coming. Plant the tree anyway, my father would say. And perhaps with those words he would put an end to the argument.
Bibliography
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Bush, V. (1945) Science: The Endless Frontier. A Report to the President. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.
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Penrose, R. (1994) Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato (c. 360 BCE) Timaeus. Translated by D.J. Zeyl (2000). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
This essay was written for 2026 Global Essay Prize and was awarded with “Commendation”.