The billionaire owners of Space X and Blue Origin have competing visions of a space-based future. Elon Musk wants a self-sustaining settlement on Mars as a backup for humanity in case the Earth gets destroyed. Jeff Bezos wants us to move heavy industry and all polluting industries to space to save Earth’s climate, and envisions a trillion humans living in space.
Meanwhile, the United States and China are locked in a race of their own for dominance of space, with Chinese advancements far outpacing America’s. The nuclear-wielding superpowers could wind up competing over territory on the moon and Mars.
Mars, for all its flaws — and there are many, including radiation, dust storms, and unbreathable air — is the only planet in our solar system that’s a candidate for settlement. Its day and night cycle closely resembles Earth’s, its dramatic temperature swings are moderate compared to other planets, and it contains the basic building blocks of life.
But the science journalist, author, and astrophysicist Adam Becker says it’s just not worth it.
His recent book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, challenges the fashionable ideologies guiding tech leaders today, including long-termism, effective altruism, transhumanism, and space colonization.
As Becker puts it, it’s about “the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they’re trying to shove down our throats, and why they don’t work.”
Becker told Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram why he thinks Mars is worth exploring for scientific inquiry, but not as a Plan B for Earth.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
So, you think Mars is a horrible idea?
Mars is a horrible idea. Mars is a terrible place; it’s awful. There’s nothing to breathe. You’ll die of cancer if you hang out there for too long because it’s covered in radiation. The dirt is poisoned. The gravity’s too low. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does. There’s no biosphere. There’s nothing to eat. There’s nothing to breathe. If you hung out on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you would asphyxiate while the saliva boils off your tongue.
But you’re an astrophysicist, author, and journalist, which means at some point you were a young child who dreamt of space. And part of the dream of space is Mars, right?
When I was a kid, I thought that the future was in space. I watched a lot of Star Trek because I’m a huge nerd, and a young growing nerd needs to consume healthy amounts of Star Trek in order to grow up to be a big, strong nerd. When I was a kid, I thought of Star Trek as a documentary about the future. Not literally a documentary, but I thought, “Yeah, this is what we’re shooting for; this is what we want. We want to be in space, that’s where the good future is.” And then I grew up.
Notably, there weren’t a lot of billionaires on Star Trek, or they didn’t talk about it, at least.
No. In fact, what they talked about was that there was no money.
So, you grow up, and you see the intersection of space and money, and you change your mind about how you feel about space? Or at least Mars.
I love space. I did a PhD in astrophysics for a reason. I think that space research and exploring space with robots and satellites is amazing. But seeing billionaires turning space into another status icon for the ultra wealthy? It’s gross.
Musk talks about Mars as if it’s the inevitable future of humanity, that going to Mars is a project to save humanity like some giant philanthropic effort, and it’s just nonsense. He says we have to go to Mars in case there’s a disaster here on Earth, and we have to put a million people on Mars by 2050, and they have to be able to survive even if the rockets from Earth stop coming.
I’m like, dude, that is not happening. Mars is awful, and there is nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it a worse place than Mars. You could have an asteroid hit as bad as the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And the day that that happened, which is the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth, was a nicer day than any day on Mars in the last few billion years.
What about the Bezos argument for space colonization?
I will say one nice thing about one billionaire: Jeff Bezos at one point made fun of Musk for promoting Mars. He’s like, Mars sucks. I’m like, yeah, you know what? Jeff Bezos is right. Mars does suck. It’s everything he said after that that was a problem. Because Bezos also has a specific vision for space. He says we need to go out into space to live in hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous space stations so we can have a trillion humans living in space in a couple of centuries.
And before you tell us what you think of that idea, we see a lot of this in the science fiction that we love to watch, from Star Trek to Interstellar to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Absolutely. But science fiction is fiction. It is a set of stories that we tell not to predict the future, but as a setting to explore some questions about being human. One of the great science fiction authors of all time, Ursula Le Guin, said that science fiction is not a guide to the future.
Like any good millennial, there are tweets that live rent free in my head, and one of them is the Torment Nexus tweet, where it says: Science fiction author: “In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.” Tech company: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
“We should be focusing on actually making this world a better place. Mars is not hope. It’s not even a fantasy. It’s a delusion.”
I agree that science fiction can give us something to aspire to, but it’s not the literal technology in the science fiction stories. Those things are narrative devices, like warp drive. We shouldn’t aspire to warp drive because — just going to throw this out there as a physicist — that ain’t happening.
One of the things I love about Star Trek is it shows a future to aspire to in terms of how the people relate to each other and the kind of world that they’ve built, independent of the technology. Star Trek was groundbreaking, even in the original series, in showing a diverse group of people on an aspirational mission of exploration and self-actualization, and working together as friends to explore the world that we live in. That is a future to aspire to.
That is not what Bezos has in mind. Bezos’s idea is to put a trillion people in space, and he says he wants this because if we stay here on Earth in a few centuries, we’re going to run out of resources and run out of energy. And he’s right about that. If you assume the current rate of constant growth in usage of energy, then a few centuries after that, you’re using all of the energy output of the sun.
But what you’re saying is there’s an alternative, and that is to not use all of our resources.
Yeah, or at least to safeguard them more wisely and use them in a more sustainable way. But Bezos wants perpetual growth in energy usage per capita. He’s used that specific phrase. He wants each individual person to use more and more energy forever. And then he talks about how if we had a trillion people, there’d be a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. What about the Mozarts and Einsteins that are living and dying in poverty right now?
It sounds like, for all you disagree with these tech billionaires when it comes to Mars or space colonization, we all have to agree that life on Earth is not infinite. Our sun, the source of life here on Earth, will eventually die. I know it’s very far away. But we made it to the moon, and making it to Mars feels like it could be a step in the right direction.
When I sat on the steps of the Air and Space Museum here in Washington, DC, and asked people whether we should go to Mars, they didn’t talk about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They talked about the idea that space is infinite, and as a human race, it’s something we should pursue. Do you really think that we should skip the stepping stone, just because these guys have some wrongheaded ideas about why we should be taking that step in the first place?
I don’t think Mars sucks because the billionaires want to go there. I think Mars sucks and the billionaires want to go there. And why do they want to go there? Well, they’re not particularly original guys. Mars has been in our cultural psyche for a very long time, and so has the idea of sending the human race out into space.
I think, instead, we should be focusing on actually making this world a better place. Mars is not hope. It’s not even a fantasy. It’s a delusion. It is not a place where we are going to find our fate, unless that fate is painful death.
You don’t even see a reason to go there so that we can experiment with what it would be like to live on another planet long term? You don’t even see a use for that because it might teach us something about the actual moonshot that we discover in a hundred or a thousand years, which is there’s some planet in some distant galaxy that’s just like home.
If we find a planet around another star, even in our own galaxy, forget distant galaxies, that’s just like home, we’re not going. It’s not happening. The speed-of-light limit is a hard stop. We are not going. And no one is coming to save us. I find that hopeful. We have to save ourselves.
There’s a story that I think is apocryphal; toward the end of his life, somebody asked the great architect and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller if he was sad that he was going to die without ever having gone to space. And his answer was, “We’re in space.” We live in space! And we live in the most special and amazing place in space.
This is a place that we evolved to live, and everything about it is so well suited for us, and it’s not just the distance of the planet from our sun. It’s not just the mix of gases in our atmosphere. It is everything about this biosphere.
We can eat the fruit off the trees. We live in a place where food literally grows on trees. It’s awesome! This is an amazing place, and we should continue to learn about the universe that we are a part of as we build a better home for ourselves here where we belong.