This is not Mars
Somebody finally says what our colonies in space would look like (although, to be fair, there are so many distopian science fiction novels that have repeatedly said it): they would be slave compounds, or at their most charitable, company towns.
A million inhabitants live in the city under the soft pink sky of Mars, just a century after the first robotic probes from Earth visited the Red Planet. They farm and labor in habitats that shield them from dust and harsh ultraviolet radiation.
Promoted as a society unshackled from earthly laws, this town is in fact as unfree as possible. The company rules everything, owning not only the buildings but the water and air people need to survive. If a person took out a loan to pay for passage, the company effectively holds them in indentured servitude. Human rights are not a given, nor is bodily autonomy.
Matthew Francis makes that bold prediction in Scientific American. He goes on to say, though, that
Thankfully, this dystopia isn’t inevitable.
It isn’t? How does one plan to trick people into living in a brutally unsurvivable environment that lacks any appeal or relief from drudgery short of economic compulsion? I’m going to disagree. I think the entire plan is deadly, built entirely on corpses and bloody backs in the long run, and I see no other alternative. I would love to hear about this alternative plan that isn’t a product of capitalist exploitation. Instead, we get the familiar refrain naming the usual obscenely rich people scheming to take advantage of those less powerful.
However, some of the world’s most powerful men believe it’s part of humanity’s multiplanetary future, and as leaders of the private space industry they have the potential to realize much of the vision. For years, SpaceX chief Elon Musk has pushed claims that he will resettle a million people on Mars by 2050 using a thousand rockets built by his company, with the first settlers arriving by the end of this decade. Even sooner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company is plotting to build an “office park” in low-Earth orbit in the next five years called the Orbital Reef. His ultimate vision, however, is trillions of people in space colony canisters, to produce “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” in his questionable phrasing, in coming centuries.
The only good news about space colonies designed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is that they aren’t going to happen. Musk will not be launching a million people to Mars in 15 years, not even close (although I do see some fantasy synergy between Musk and Trump’s plan to deport millions of people on day one of his presidency — maybe he’s dreaming of filling his Martian city with Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and South American gang-bangers). Bezos is not going to build an office park in Earth orbit, not as long as he can bulldoze farm land for cheap and assemble giant concrete boxes here on Earth. Those are two professional liars. Don’t believe anything they promise, because all they really promise is controlling you to their benefit.
All you need to do to see their true vision of the future is look at what Musk does in the present. He’s a control freak. He’s building a compound in Austin, Texas. It’s creepy and controlling, and just the idea of building a “compound” for your family reeks of Mormon cultishness and Saudi dictatorships.
On a quiet, leafy street of multimillion-dollar properties, one stands out: a 14,400-square-foot mansion that looks like a villa plucked from the hills of Tuscany and transplanted to Austin, Texas.
This is where Elon Musk, 53, the world’s richest man and perhaps the most important campaign backer of former President Donald J. Trump, has been trying to establish the cornerstone of an unusual family compound, according to four people familiar with his plans.
Mr. Musk has told people close to him in recent months that he envisions his children (of which there are at least 11) and two of their three mothers occupying adjoining properties. That way, his younger children could be a part of one another’s lives, and Mr. Musk could schedule time among them.
He’s got lots of money, he could afford to give his wives and children complete freedom and the ability to be autonomous agents of their own will, but no — he wants them conveniently close to do his bidding. Do you really think his Martian workers would be allowed any kind of independence? If they whispered the word “union” he’d shut off their air. Musk is very concerned about birth rates, too. Workers would not only have quotas of profitable units produced, but would have quotas of children to pump out. Having a self-perpetuating labor force totally under his control is the main virtue of a Mars colony to him. The only pronoun he values is the possessive pronoun that he’d apply to children, workers, and women.
Francis has it right.
To put it bluntly: if our space overlords behave this way on Earth with governments looking over their shoulders, how will they behave off-world with little possibility of oversight or redress? Even returning to Earth from Mars might be technically impossible. Trusting your life to private space companies is a big gamble, not least since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May signed a bill shielding SpaceX and other companies from liability from death or injury incurred from spaceflight.
If you want a glimpse of the real future of space colonization, read this story about how Saudi princes control their own daughters. It’s got compounds. The few things it has that a Mars colony wouldn’t is gilded cages and shopping trips to Dubai (under armed guard, of course). That’s the fate of any people who find themselves at the mercy of wealthy, grasping autocrats, like Musk or Bezos.
We should not even be considering space colonization — take it right off the table.
Musk and Bezos don’t serve a fascist regime, but like von Braun, their visions are rooted in 20th-century colonialism, resource extraction and disregard for labor rights. Martian company towns off-world won’t be the libertarian paradise promised by our tech billionaires.
Space exploration, yes; space exploitation, no. It should not be in the hands of billionaires, who we have learned, are the worst people on the planet.
Is there an English version of the German saying “Geld verdirbt den Charakter.” (Money spoils the character)?
I think their riches have rotted far more than the character of these delusional bastards.
Well, I suppose you have to be evil and delusional to amass such an absurd pile of money in the first place.
Wouldn’t it just make more sense to send out advanced robotics and use automation and AI to do all the heaving lifting for humans and get it ready in advance for us to enjoy the “good life” without any of the dangers or hard scrabble existence?
Oh yeah — that’s just a bunch of bullshit, too.
Musk has a history of over promising and not delivering.
Where are those self driving cars?
Where is the humanoid robots?
X has lost 80% of its value.
This isn’t going to happen.
Even if we could get people to Mars by 2030, then what?
They get stuck on a planet that is extremely uninhabitable.
The atmosphere is 1% of earth and mostly CO2.
Water is in short supply.
It’s cold. “The average temperature on Mars is -85°F (-65°C).”
It gets cold enough that sometimes the CO2 freezes.
Nothing to eat.
A one way trip to death.
I’m not going.
raven@3: “A one way trip to death.
I’m not going.”
Me neither, but considering how many of his fans descent on any article about him and defend and glorify his every brain fart I think these guys would be a usable pool to recruit from.
Now that reminds me, I recently found someone defending Musktwits broken promises about, well, everything as “Musk never broke a promise. These weren’t promises but predictions and predictions are usually of by a few years.”
Yeah, I laughed too.
I wonder how the dating scene on Mars is.
We need Captain Picard to talk sense into these morons.
If that doesn’t work. Send Captain Kirk to beat the shit out of them.
I mean… technically?
But as soon as Republicans return to power they’ll either serve a fascist regime of government officials who hold sway over oligarchs or lead a fascist regime of oligarchs who hold sway over government officials.
Musk’s Martian town might be conceptually linked to the Mittelbau Dora V2 factory, run by concentration camp prisoners.
.
About resource extraction. Ores have formed in Earth’s crust because of vigorous tectonic activity, particularly during the Neoproterozoic. By contrast the martian crust has had a rather boring history. If you have to melt ten tons of rock to get half a pound of the substance you are looking for I do not see Mars becoming self-sufficient for many things.
Not currently but they may very well be serving one soon enough. Musk is working toward that outcome. Bezos is too chickenshit to thumb the scale against it via WaPo.
“How does one plan to trick people into living in a brutally unsurvivable environment that lacks any appeal or relief from drudgery short of economic compulsion?”
Thats easy just convince roughly half the American population to vote for Trump.
I suspect that Musk’s Martian colonies would resemble the Apartheid era South Africa of his childhood, only with nowhere for unwilling subjects to escape to.
Of course, there are so many issues that would get in the way of making an truly independent colony off Earth. For example, has anyone managed to create a self-sustaining environment that could support human life for a non-trivial amount of time? The infamous Biosphere 2 experiment was an utter failure, with the “crew” slowly starving and suffocating from dropping oxygen and rising CO2 levels. Only access to outside resources allowed them to continue as long as the did.
birgerjohansson at 8:
I still haven’t seen any soundbite explain what economic activity is supposed to make Musk’s Martian colony financially viable. I don’t think the mere opportunity to exploit human labor is going to cut it. I also don’t think Earth’s governments are going to fund a Martian scientific research base in near future, much less one that employs a million people. Or fund a giant program to eventually terraform Mars and make it financially self-sustaining in the same way Earth is financially self-sustaining, just for the sake of having humans inhabit two planets.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk has pushed claims that he will resettle a million people on Mars by 2050…
God’s death, why did anyone ever take this asshole seriously? Anyone with any common sense can see — as I’ve been seeing since I first heard #QElon talking about Mars colonies — that he has no clue what he’s talking about, and doesn’t care. All he’s ever done is repeat old ill-defined pop-culture futuristic fantasies to get attention and pretend he’s some sort of visionary genius.
America has bought this asinine delusion that rich people are, BY DEFINITION, bold brave visionaries who Get It Done. And morons like #QElon and Bezos are quite happy to keep on telling us what we’ve come to believe we need to hear. And they’re getting worse over time, not better.
These rich guys are fascist blow-hards, but they do know something about capitalism: that us peasants mostly don’t have a choice as to how we are sucked into that system. We are, whether we like it or not (and Marx et al knew that, going on 200 years ago.) As far as “choosing” to go to Mars? Nah. People may be forced into going there, no choice. As a follow-up to college, or even high school: you’ve got loans to pay off? Sign on the dotted line, go to Mars, pay off those loans for the rest of your life. Because all you own is your labor…
@mordred #1:
I can’t think of a direct equivalent, but since gaining money all too often equates to gaining power and influence there’s always the saying, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Regarding reproduction in Martian colony,
If Musk or whoever were able to recruit a million settlers within a couple decades, he could presumably continue to recruit more people to maintain the colony with little or no reproduction. Then it’s a question of whether the goal is to actually establish humanity on Mars, or just run a commune of slaves or mutually like-minded volunteers.
I recently saw the argument on Twitter (where else) that there are people who’d be motivated to settle on Mars because something something political repression by governments and mainstream cultural values on Earth. Aside from the fact that a Mars colony would actually be actually highly hierarchical and disciplined as a society, you’d need to find a large number of people who are politically at odds with the mainstream society, and the very idea of collective authority, but also somehow like-minded enough to work as a close-knit collective with each other. If they had children on Mars, those children would lack the advantage of having been selected based on ideology, work talent or motivation to live on Mars, though I guess it’d be relatively easy to indoctrinate them to the founders’ ideology. Take that, Earth-bound collectivists!
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.
An old saying is “Money is the root of all evil.”
It is a slight misquote of a bible verse from the New Testament.
You don’t hear it much any more probably because we all need money to live and spend most of our time, getting enough money to survive by working at a job. Or these days at two jobs. Or maybe three jobs.
My friend once had to splice together three part time jobs to live in one of the expensive cities on the West coast.
With the gig economy, this is probably common.
Incidentally, a couple years ago on Twitter ago I saw an artwork that purported to portray (perhaps not entirely literally, but still) a bold inspirational vision of humans living on Mars. A white guy hangs out on desert dunes with his car, apparently enjoying his solitude or freedom or whatever. He’s in regular clothes, implying a breathable atmosphere and not too harsh radiation environment. The Sun in the reddish background sky is just partially eclipsed by a roundish body about half its own apparent size, which I guess is supposed to be Phobos.
A joke immediately came to my mind that this isn’t Mars. It may look like a barely terraformed Mars, but – plot twist – it’s actually a dystopian future Earth after ecological collapse. The thing passing in front of Sun is an artificial “death star”, or giant orbital space station built for whatever purpose. It was probably a commercial project by some megalomaniacal trillionaire, and now it’s been abandoned after civilization collapse or just reckless business practice. The people living on barely habitable Earth can look up to it while they cling to their Mad-Maxesque junk cars and other symbols of consumerism.
The idiots who fantasize about living on Mars should first try overwintering in Antarctica. I visited the Antarctic Peninsula during their summer on an ecotour and it was great, but it was the very warmest part of the year and only for a few days. There are many people who overwinter at various bases, including at the South Pole. Musk should overwinter at the South Pole before further fantasizing. It would be paradise compared to any fantasy he has about Mars.
The fact that an obvious disaster like DJT has a good chance to establish a fascist government is all the evidence we need to conclude that, yes, there are plenty of people gullible enough to hand their life savings to a billionaire who promises a utopia on Mars.
A social emphasis on colonizing space instead of fixing the planet is scavenger thinking to me. Especially in powerful bigoted descendants of colonizers and slavers.
That’s pretty much the plot of the latest Murderbot novel.
In the old days it was just men on space voyages. Today we have women. It seems accepted.
Now I have to tell you folks that women in this environment need to be able to say no to men as well as no to pregnancy.
Hemidactylus @9: Do you honestly think that Bezos is just scared to speak out against Trump and not in favor of the guy promising to quash workers’ rights?
FWIW: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-election-elon-musk-nasa-2024-10
Oh, that’s the easy part: just promise that there will only be white people there.
As for the general topic of space colonization, the environmental strictures, especially early on, mean there will be no libertarian-fantasy Wild West frontier towns. There are two ways it can go, the egalitarian way and the non-egalitarian way. The former would mean a large, collective effort that if successful would result in some sort of a commune, with some strict rules (especially around safety, and minimum work contributions from the able-bodied likely as well) but evenhandedly applied.
The latter would result in, essentially, feudalism reborn off-Earth. For a Mars version look no further than the original Total Recall movie. Which leads to:
Well, there’s always the three-breasted woman … at least until Elon Cohaagen shuts off Sector G’s air. :P
P.S. Had more glitches submitting this comment. Though it said “Logged in as Bekenstein Bound. Log out?” above the input box, when I clicked “Preview” it came up bylined “Anonymous” instead, and when I tried to post it complained “You must be logged in to post” despite the fact that I was logged in. If you can read this, logging out and back in fixed it, but I resent having to jump through extra hoops for no discernible reason whatsoever and ask that, as site admin, you investigate these comment submission glitches that seem to happen on a weekly basis if not more often.
[BB, there is no “site admin”, there is PZ. And the other bloggers, as required.
PZ is busy enough without fiddling with code]
Too many Ayn Rand fans who think Atlas Shrugged is a credible plan to create Captains of Industry utopia.
They really don’t understand how their position is parasitic sitting on top of a larger organism
How does one plan to trick people into living in a brutally unsurvivable environment that lacks any appeal …?
Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth published a manual on such a project 71 years ago (albeit they chose Venus as their Levittown). Musk has probably memorized it.
@29
absolutely true, if actually implemented it would lead to absolute despotism with feudal aspects more akin to the Ottoman empire at its worse or Putin’s Russia then a utopian paradise.
sounds like the proposal of a Mars Colony is asking for heroes to come and colonize hell to save humanity from itself. We are the only real reason earth might have a hard time supporting us
I’m surprised one of the “But we have to go into space to prevent humanity from dying out!” types that usually show up for such threads hasn’t appeared.
The reality is that we have no idea if pregnancy is possible in microgravity. No one has apparently been pregnant and gone into orbit, or gotten pregnant off Earth. It may not be physically possible. Even if it is we have no idea if a baby born in space would survive, or have a normal childhood development cycle. And someone actually having a pregnancy to find out what happens is highly questionable ethically.
Space Merchants.
I remember it well.
It was one of the first books I ever read when a grade schooler in the 1950s.
Like 1984 it has aged well.
That copy got lost when I moved out and went to the university. I found it a few months ago, in a box of my parent’s books. Published in the 1950s.
It is in mice but full term development of the embryo is still unknown.
It is likely possible but not going to be normal development.
You don’t find this out with humans.
A few dozen animal experiments with mice and primates would be done first.
It works with cockroaches but that doesn’t tell you a whole lot about large bodied primates.
Mars isn’t microgravity though.
40% of earth’s gravity.
elon watched season 1 of the expanse and said “wow the MCR is fucking cool”
C’mon folks, addled billionaire fantasies aside, we know how this is going to end:
– either nothing happens, and this becomes yet another of EM dribblings, of which there are many already,
– or something will be really tried, so we get a spaceship full of corpses crashing on Mars, or a base full of ditto shortly after. In that case, EM could find himself on some hot water at last.
In either case it’s hardly anything of much import, a part from the poor saps doing the corpse thing.
Say no to tryants and wanna -be tyrants generally. Space or otherwise.
Note that just becoz one dystopian model of Mars or spac ecolonies exists doesn’t mean its the only model or the one that ahs to be adopted ie. Musks’vision isn’t the only way or best way of creating and running such colonies. Other better models and possibilities also exist.
well there are other models but unlikely 20,000,000 unit sized ones on Mars to save humanity.
O’Neil cylinders at Lagrange points and other stable orbits are possible and might be handy for exploiting the less hospitable planets and moons scatted around the solar system for raw materials to build such things.
what ever we do to make Mars of any use long term it needs to have a stronger magnetic field to maintain an atmosphere conducive to any life we might find helpful
Heh heh heh.
What about realistic models and possibilities?
—
While I am at it:
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/devinseanmartin/2024/04/02/the-worlds-celebrity-billionaires-2024-taylor-swift-kim-kardashian-oprah/)
“Here are the 14 celebrities—worth a collective $31 billion and listed in net worth order—who have turned their fame into enough fortune to make the 2024 World’s Billionaires list.”
The worst people.
“3. Michael Jordan
Net Worth: $3.2 Billion | Age: 61 | Citizenship: U.S.”
I think as soon as you see the word “colonize,” it would probably be a good idea to back away. Oops, excuse me, wrong door.
@ ^ Matthew Currie : Entomology classroom study? Insects and, for that matter, plants and protists (eg slime moulds) and alot of other things naturally – or unnaturally – colonise quite a bit.
@39. John Morales :
Well, they exist or at least have been suggested in a variety of different ways in varying levels of detail by a variety of people eg Carl Sagaan, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pamela Sargent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Sargent), etc..
They’ve also been seriously proposed by people outside of SF such as NASA ( https://www.nasa.gov/headquarters/library/find/bibliographies/space-colonization/ ) and Robert Zunbrin whoose vision pre-dates Musks and is arguably more realistic. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars )
^ Zubrin that is, for clarity, not Zunbrin, sorry..
Given how bad the economics of commercial office space in mundane Earthly locations are right now, I really don’t see this happening. Although I suppose it would be one way of enforcing his stupid mandatory return-to-the-office policies…
OT, to Bekenstein Bound, @ #27: As far as I know, FTB has no site admins or technical staff of any kind, and no money for any either. The backend was all cobbled together by an former contributor who has long since moved on to other things, it’s run on a shoestring out of PZ’s own pocket, and it’s a minor miracle that the place stays up at all.
@27. Bekenstein Bound : I ha dthesame issue the other day, well, last week or so~ish too.
If memory serves she was gunned down by the bad guys before that tho?