Elon Musk’s Babble About Colonizing Mars Is Nonsense
In a new book, an astrophysicist takes down billionaire tech-bros’ self-serving ideas.
Every rational person knows that Elon Musk’s incessant talk about moving human life to Mars is a colossal, likely drug cocktail–infused fantasy, but far too many people apparently are buying his nonsense that the tech bros will heroically save humankind via interplanetary travel.
So, it’s heartening to listen to an astrophysicist take down Musk’s lunatic ideas. On a recent Nerd Reich podcast, “Why Mars Will Kill You: And Why Tech Billionaires Are Lying About It,” host Gil Duran interviews science journalist Adam Becker (who holds a PhD in astrophysics) about his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, and the conversation manages to be both sobering and hilarious.
For example, here’s Becker’s succinct take on just how hospitable to humans the Red Planet is:
“Mars colonization, sending large numbers of people to live and work and have families on Mars, that is largely bullshit, because Mars is terrible. Mars is just an awful place. The gravity is too low. The radiation levels are too high. There’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison. And these are not even all of the problems.”
Duran notes that while Hollywood has always supported this particular fantasy, far too many journalists have given credence to Musk’s kooky idea. I’m not much of a fan of science fiction, but even I saw “The Martian,” based on a popular novel by Andy Weir, which was made into a thoroughly entertaining movie by director Ridley Scott and actor Matt Damon. Hollywood puts fantasies on the screen — that’s what it does.
But journalists should know that human beings are not going to colonize Mars, and we should not play into Musk’s delusions or strategic diversions to turn attention away from the truly awful things he is actively doing here on Earth.
Musk and Trump — now engaged in a schoolboys’ spat — are responsible for firing much of the nonpartisan federal workforce, ending the careers of tens of thousands of dedicated, knowledgeable people, and seriously diminishing the services of our government for all of us. The Trump-Musk dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) alone has already caused an estimated 300,000 deaths from disease and famine.
Billionaire tech bros like Musk may not care about others’ lives, but they reel to consider the end of their own magnificent lives. When asked about what motivated the tech billionaires to believe in such nonsense, Becker said he didn’t want to be an armchair psychoanalyst, but noted Larry Ellison, of Oracle fame, had been quite explicit about his desires:
“Death is the final loss of control, right? And it’s the great leveler, the great equalizer, everybody dies. And these guys do not see themselves as level or equal with the rest of us. And if you don’t believe me, when I say that, by the way, if you think that I’m just sort of irresponsibly psychoanalyzing these guys from a distance, I suggest going and taking a look at what a particular tech mogul, Larry Ellison, has said about death. He’s very, very explicit about this. It’s just not acceptable to them that they will have to give everything up and lose everything at the end of their lives when they die. They just want to keep going because nothing could ever be enough.”
As you may recall, Mary Trump’s book about her not beloved Uncle Donald is titled “Too Much and Never Enough.” There was a reason that ancient Egyptian kings at death were mummified, placed in sarcophagi, and often entombed in great stone pyramids along with “grave goods” and, sometimes, human sacrifices — they expected an afterlife where they could enjoy some of their favorite things and have the help of a servant or two. (Later nobility and wealthy people made do with tomb effigies.)
Beyond their primary goal of grifting on the American public, perhaps that is what is motivating Trump and Musk to destroy the reputation of the United States and destroy the Western alliance (and education, the arts, and, well, civilized society in general) — they both want to be big men of history so their stories will be told forever.
Neither Trump nor Musk cares a whit if human beings are sacrificed as a result of their ambitions. (Candidate Trump stated multiple times that he wanted people to canvass for him or get out to vote in cruel weather conditions, even if they risked death doing so.)
As Becker ponders on the podcast, why would people dream about something so utterly meaningless as human colonies on Mars (“where your saliva would boil off your tongue as you quickly asphyxiate”), when we are already living in an environment (mostly) perfectly suited for human beings and other creatures?
Becker goes on to note that there are places on our planet where we know we cannot live, and those places are not anywhere near as harsh as Mars: “There are places on Earth that are far more hospitable than anywhere else in the solar system, like say, Antarctica and the polar night or the bottom of the ocean. And we don’t live there.”
Instead of dismantling the world’s most lasting democracy and denying climate change, if the tech billionaire bros want to be remembered as beneficent kings, they should be doing all they can to save the world we have. Some billionaires have pursued the old noblesse oblige philanthropic ideals, from Joan Kroc’s gift to National Public Radio, to Bill and Melinda Gates long history of supporting global health, to MacKenzie Scott putting her share of the Amazon fortune to better use than her ex-husband’s pursuit of buying mansions and rocketing celebrities to the edge of space, like some ultimate amusement park ride.
The biggest puzzle, perhaps, is why Musk, Peter Thiel, and other like-minded tech bros refuse to see that they have succeeded because of the very system — the democratic republic founded on the rule of law and the dissemination of trustworthy information — they are working to dismantle:
“But why are they slashing the budgets, given that this is sort of the engine of productivity that all of them have benefited from and made their billions from? That’s because they don’t understand how the world works. They don’t understand that this is the engine of productivity that they’ve benefited from, and they also think that it’s okay to sort of pull up the ladder behind them, that they’ll be okay if everything just collapses, that their money will insulate them. And that’s not true either. So yeah, I mean, I don’t want to say they’re doing it because they’re stupid, but I will say they’re doing it because they do not understand how the world works or what the benefit of fundamental research is.”
But these anti-democratic tech guys aren’t building a future (or even a bailout plan) for humanity. They are little boys with far too much money trying to find a way to live forever — or just to plunder as much as they can before they depart.
Becker notes they want us to believe in a false choice:
“One of the things that these billionaires want to do with these visions of the future that they’re imposing on us is to make us believe that there’s one or maybe two possible futures, and that’s it. That either there’s this utopia, or some sort of extinction or dystopia, and that’s it. Musk has actually said this very explicitly.”
But that’s the standard false binary that Trump and other authoritarian types use to scare people into believing in the “strongman” who has the “best plans” and can solve big problems “on day one.” The alternative is always apocalyptic (like Trump’s favorite line, “You won’t have a country anymore”).
Becker calls it for what it is: nonsense.
“Based on history, based on science, based on sociology, the future is open. There are so many ways that this could all go that the future of our lives and the lives of those who come after us could go.”
When Becker flatly states, “There’s no disaster that could befall Earth that would make Mars a better option,” as a science journalist, he is merely addressing the subject at hand. He is not outright saying that Musk’s foolishness about colonizing Mars should make us seriously consider other things the surprisingly adolescent Musk and the other right-wing tech billionaires have to say. (Just because you’re wildly wrong, even deluded, about one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong about other things.)
But he understands their motives, what they are after, and how they live in a reflexive contrarian bubble of their own making, which leads to brain rot. They think that because they are super rich it means they are super smart.
The madness in Musk’s bullshit about colonizing Mars (as with his endless unmet promises about Tesla and SpaceX) should indeed be extended to Thiel’s quest to “Yarvin” us into smaller feudal states, each beholden to a god-like tech bro.
Near the end of his book, Becker has this to say about the supposed inevitability of the tech bros’ plans:
“This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines.”
We remain free (at least, for now) to choose the future we want.
You can listen to Duran’s and Becker’s lively conversation here.
