Rethinking “Spaceship Earth”: Reflections on The Beginning of Infinity

I’ve been reading The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, and it’s one of those books that quietly rearranges the furniture in your head. It challenges some of the ideas I’ve taken for granted for years—particularly the “Spaceship Earth” notion I grew up with: that our planet was once a kind of utopia, now steadily degraded by human action.

Deutsch pushes hard against that narrative. He argues that Earth was never a utopia—that the idea of a perfect past is a comforting fiction. Instead, he suggests that our progress, our survival, and even our flourishing have always come from solving problems, not from being lucky enough to inherit a paradise.

It’s a profound shift. If you believe the planet was a utopia that we’ve ruined, the best we can hope for is preservation—damage control. But if you believe that progress is driven by human problem-solving, the story becomes one of potential and agency. We aren’t custodians of a fragile Eden; we’re explorers in a universe of solvable problems.

Deutsch captures this with a few lines that I keep returning to:

“There will always be problems.”
“All problems are soluble unless bounded by the laws of physics.”
“The perspiration stage can always be automated. The inspiration stage cannot.”

These are not just abstract ideas—they are deeply economic. They suggest that value creation comes from insight and creativity, not just labour or resources. The profit motive, at its best, is a signal that society rewards people who solve problems that others care about. It is a mechanism for allocating attention toward solvable, meaningful challenges.

Of course, it can also go wrong—extractive industries, speculative bubbles, and monopolies all represent value capture without problem-solving. But at its core, Deutsch’s argument reframes the conversation: economics is not the art of scarcity, but the art of expanding the possible through ideas.

Reading The Beginning of Infinity has reminded me that pessimism is often just misplaced humility. Yes, the world has problems—but that’s the point. The alternative is stasis. And stasis, as Deutsch reminds us, is death.