Mankind doesn’t venture into the unknown to contribute to the sum of human knowledge or promote mutual understanding and altruism.

A couple of social-media accounts generated controversy on Thursday morning by posting a clip of CBS host Vladimir Duthiers asking astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson an exceedingly silly question about the ethics of lunar colonization.

“We know how the age of colonialism worked on this planet,” the host mused. “Should we be trying to colonize and saying that there’s a ‘keep-out zone’ that — not other countries can participate in having . . .” Duthiers trailed off, prompting Tyson to rescue the host from himself.

“The real problem with colonization history in Western civilization is that there were people already there,” the popular academic observed. Yes, that would be the primary distinction between settling uncultivated lands on Earth and opening virgin frontiers in space. Tyson did not buy Duthiers’ premise on that front, but he was nevertheless suspicious of the Trump administration’s plan to put a small nuclear reactor on the lunar surface as a foundation for a future human presence.

Tyson’s objections range from the predictable complaint that the reactor draws resources from other purely scientific ventures to the degree to which the project is little more than a “muscle flexing” by the United States amid its grubby geopolitical conflicts with space-faring powers like China and Russia. He mourned the extent to which the Cold War–era space race was typified by significant investments in scientific study and education — a characteristic he believes the present space race lacks. “Science is highly cross-pollinating,” Tyson noted, citing the degree of Cold War–era public interest in space that drove mass interest in space-related educational products.

True enough, but that interest was a function of the campaign of fraught and engrossing human exploration that captured American imaginations. It’s not hard to envision the degree to which the presence of a reactor on the moon produces new opportunities that ingenuity could exploit — opportunities that fire the minds of students, engineers, and investors alike. A reactor and its promise could inspire a level of invention that has not been stimulated by even the most fascinating and productive but unmanned ventures into the solar system.

America should “be honest about the motives” that have inspired this project, Tyson insisted. Indeed, Sean Duffy has been. “China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” his directive read. Indeed, it was China that Duffy accused of preparing to implement a “keep-out zone” around any footprint it established on the lunar surface. It is only informed speculation that leads observers to conclude that the U.S. would do the same thing — an inference that might inspire another conclusion: that the extension of geopolitics into space is inevitable. That’s not colonialism but the establishment of defensive perimeters.

Even though Tyson is skeptical of lunar colonization, he is open to the prospect of human settlement on extraplanetary bodies — not for scientific reasons, though. “I don’t see it as a realistic way to deal with our overpopulation or overconsumption of resources” in the absence of a human presence on other worlds, he mused. This invocation of the tenets of the Malthusian faith — a religion that rejects mankind’s capacity to engineer itself out of scarcity challenges — doesn’t inspire confidence.

But Tyson does (or, at least, did) understand that scientific achievement on the scale envisioned by advocates for human space exploration is often a byproduct of geostrategic enterprises. “Geopolitics is one of the strongest drivers of why people — why nations go into space,” he told CNN’s host two years ago, “not science, unfortunately.” Fortunately, or otherwise, Tyson is describing human nature.

Mankind doesn’t venture into the unknown to contribute to the sum of human knowledge or promote mutual understanding and altruism. They go to secure riches for themselves and their patrons. To the extent that a lunar reactor serves as a gateway to the inner solar system for governmental and commercial enterprises, it will serve as the impetus for more science than Tyson could imagine. Indeed, the whole thing might even be profitable.