I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about the feasibility of a Mars settlement… and the trustworthiness of the people currently best known for advocating it.
Mars is the closest place to Earth where human beings could even theoretically live. But, right now, the best-known supporters of establishing a human presence on the red planet are a gang of billionaires who are notorious for their unreliable, failure-prone technology, their long string of broken promises, and their Ayn Randian, libertarian-supremacist views. They’re absolutely not the kind of people anyone should trust to be in control of the oxygen supply.
So if they’re not the ones who should take us to Mars, who is? Or this is even a goal we should pursue at all?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)
It’s not just Musk. The same goes for all the self-declared rationalists and tech-bro billionaires who think they’re head and shoulders above the common herd. Far too many of them prove to be con artists, like Sam Bankman-Fried, or swollen with lethal hubris, like Stockton Rush, or wannabe mad scientists who believe that rules are for little people, like Marc Andreessen.
None of them are trustworthy. None of them have wisdom to match their wealth or their lofty rhetoric. If we’re going to go to Mars—and, for the record, I do hope we eventually go to Mars—it shouldn’t be the private vanity project of a billionaire. It should be a shared commitment on behalf of all humanity, with only our best representatives selected for the mission.
I think Musk does deserve credit for something: rattling the market.
He rattled the market for electric vehicles. Do you believe we’d have the market penetration of EVs we have already if it weren’t for Tesla? Whatever your view of the quality of their vehicles, you surely can’t deny that the reason there’s such a wide range of EVs available is because Teslas exist. Similarly, SpaceX is rekindling some public interest in space technology that NASA had mostly lost.
I don’t think the future is Tesla or SpaceX, any than John Logie Baird’s TV technology was the future when it started. But Musk has nudged us to the future. Thanks Elon… now move on.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Musk’s ambition is to be Cohaagen, the bad guy from Total Recall. Without, I’m assuming, the eventual comeuppance dished out by Ahnold, or any inconvenient alien technology cropping up that will allow the proletariat to seize the means of respiration.
Well, that’s up to whoever is paying, no?
I don’t really see any ‘should’ there, other than your personal preference.
Several years ago, I predicted the following, and currently have little reason to revise it:
The first wave to establish a significant off-Earth presence will be governments: for science, military, and cultural supremacy purposes.
The second wave will be the tech billionaires: for commercial supremacy purposes at first, and later to establish libertarian “paradises” which are really dystopian techno-feudalist kingdoms.
The third wave will be major religious movements seeking to “leave the corruption of the old world behind”, similar to the Pilgrims, Puritans, and some of the other groups colonizing the Eastern US during the 1600s and 1700s.
The fourth wave will be a wide variety of radical separatist groups whose particular notions of freedom don’t mesh well with whatever most societies on Earth look like in the early-mid 22nd century (or whenever). It’s hard to predict what will matter by that point. The reason why this group is last is because I suspect that they’d have the most difficulty getting the resources needed to establish a significant off-world presence.
There would also be significant overlaps between the waves. It’s also possible that at some point, after all of the kinks, dangers, and logistics have been thoroughly worked out, and humanity is very well-established in the solar system and possibly making a literal reach for the stars, that there will be a movement for a total evacuation of Earth (and significant resistance to such happening) in order to turn it into a nature preserve. If so, no predictions to how that would go, as that would be centuries away.
One issue that rarely comes up is “what about the next generations?” Early colonists will be dedicated to their “perfect society”, but some of their descendants won’t be. Some of these societies will eventually become closed off, preventing anyone from entering, leaving, or communicating with the outside. Some of the third (religious) wave might be closed off from the outset. It’s a matter of “do people have the right to semi-permanently limit their descendants’ rights and freedoms”? Most of us would say no, yet under a colonization scenario we’d probably allow it anyway.