“There are good reasons to worry about the future of humanity. Do we have a future, and if so, how much and what kind?”
“On 27 September 2016, the SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a bold, direct claim: that, in order to survive an inevitable extinction event, humans would need to ‘become a space-faring civilisation and a multi-planetary species’.”
“Musk’s plan to colonise Mars is a sign of an older and recurring social problem. What happens when the rich and powerful isolate themselves from everyday concerns? Musk wants to innovate and leave Earth, rather than to take care of it, or fix it, and stay.”
“Like so many of his peers in the innovating and disrupting classes, Musk prefers to dwell in fantasy and science fiction, safely removed from the world of here and now.”
“Musk is a utopian, in the original Greek meaning: ‘no place’. Repulsed by the world we all share, he dreams of a place that does not exist.”
“Abernathy’s insight about the priorities of a country that could send men into space while millions of Americans lacked medical care, shelter and food found a new voice in Gil Scott-Heron.”
“The poet and musician, who had cultivated a reputation for his socially charged spoken-word performances, debuted a new piece: ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1970):”
“A rat done bit my sister Nell (With Whitey on the Moon) Her face and arms began to swell (And Whitey’s on the Moon) I can’t pay no doctor bill (But Whitey’s on the Moon) Ten years from now I’ll be paying still (While Whitey’s on the Moon)”
“But neither Abernathy’s protest nor Scott-Heron’s anthem moved the country’s political priorities from space exploration to the provision of housing or health care.”
“How did Musk become a leader of the most capital-intensive and symbolically loaded sector in the US high-tech economy?”
“Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015) provides some useful details. A child of privilege, Musk grew up in one of the largest homes in Pretoria in South Africa, far removed from the systematic racism and violence that characterised the country’s apartheid regime. Musk showed early technical promise: when he was 12, he created a video game – Blastar – set in outer space.”
“As a child, he was known as a spaced-out nerd who corrected his peers’ mistakes. He was bullied. By his teen years, Musk fantasised about escaping South Africa for the US. After he graduated from high school in 1989, he followed through on these dreams, leaving behind his impoverished and racially divided country.”
“Musk moved first to Canada and then the US, and earned degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania before heading to California with entrepreneurial ambitions.”
“With a $30,000 gift from their father, in 1995 Elon and his brother Kimbal created a company called Zip2, which combined city directories, advertisements and mapping. Four years later, Compaq bought Zip2 for more than $300 million. Musk’s next venture was in online banking and email payments. A year on, Musk’s company, X.com, merged with PayPal; two years on, eBay bought the joint venture for $1.5 billion in stock, with $165 million of it going to Elon.”
“From his early days in business, Musk developed a reputation for harshness. He chastised one employee who missed a company event to be at the birth of his child: ‘You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.’”
“The Canadian author Justine Musk, his first wife, recounted to his biographer:
Elon is not someone who would say: ‘I feel you. I see your point of view.’ Because he doesn’t have that ‘I feel you’ dimension, there were things that seemed obvious to other people that weren’t that obvious to him.”
“He faced a choice: what to do next? He dreamed big. At his Caltech commencement address in 2012, he explained:
I thought, well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money’, which is okay, but, it was really ‘What do I think is going to most affect the future of humanity?’”
“Musk hit upon two endeavours: first, to create sustainable-energy technologies, which led to his involvement with Tesla Motors. Second, to go to Mars, which led to SpaceX. There is a profound moral distance between the types of problems that Tesla Motors and SpaceX seek to resolve.”
“Musk and his fellow Teslans have made electric vehicles cool, sexy and relatively affordable. That is commendable. There’s still a lot of work to be done, however, to move the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants toward clean energy. And there is little evidence that Tesla will move beyond high-end, niche products. The Tesla Powerwall, for example, is a battery system that supplies power to households off the electric grid. But with a lifetime cost that is higher than purchasing energy from a utility company, the Powerwall appeals mainly to wealthy homeowners who cannot stomach the idea of being without their gadgets during power outages.”
“For all its ideals and the great possibilities inherent in them, Tesla remains a company that makes toys for rich people.”
“It is in this context that Musk’s fantasy of bringing human civilisation to Mars is best understood. A trip to Mars requires awe-inspiring technological advance and immense wealth. It catalyses something deep inside the human imagination. It is also at least as removed from the needs and experiences of humans, and Musk’s own society… as Earth is from Mars.”
“Musk insists that humans in fact ‘need’ to go to Mars. The Mars mission, he argues, is the best way for humanity to become what he calls a ‘space-faring civilisation and a multi-planetary species’. This otherworldly venture, he says, is necessary to mitigate the ‘existential threat’ from artificial intelligence (AI) that might wipe out human life on Earth.”
“Musk’s existential concerns, and his look to other worlds for solutions, are not unique among the elite of the technology world. Others have expressed what might best be understood as a quasi-philosophical paranoia that our Universe is really just a simulation inside a giant computer.”
“Musk himself has fallen under the sway of the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who put forward the simulation theory in 2003. Bostrom has also argued that addressing ‘existential risks’ such as AI should be a global priority. The idea that Google’s CEO Larry Page might create artificially intelligent robots that will destroy humanity reportedly keeps Musk up at night. ‘I’m really worried about this,’ Musk told his biographer. ‘He could produce something evil by accident.’”
“Musk has no connection to ordinary people and ordinary lives.”
“To protect humanity from existential threats, one can imagine a multibillion-dollar asteroid-defence system that would keep humans from sharing the same fate as the dinosaurs. One could also invest multiple billions into existing philanthropies, such as those that protect the health, safety and education of vulnerable human beings.”
“Or, take other risks to planet Earth and its human occupants: the calamity of climate change and rising oceans; infectious diseases; or the slow disaster of infrastructural decay.”
“For $10 billion dollars, the US could fully deploy positive train-control systems that would avoid such tragic accidents as recently seen in Philadelphia and Hoboken in New Jersey. For $1.5 billion, we could upgrade the lead-contaminated water infrastructure in Flint, Michigan; for $400 billion, we could repair the water infrastructure of the entire US. It’s jarring to think that one of the brightest minds of our age would rather fund 40 trips to Mars than keep children in his own country safe from poisoned water. It’s enough to make one wonder what led Musk to develop such contempt for the billions of humans who could never escape Earth.”
“Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and a critic of the ‘hubris’ of using Mars as a ‘backup planet’, puts this point simply and directly: ‘The idea that Mars will somehow save us from the decisions we’ve made is a false one.’ If we ‘truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth.’”
“Musk’s plan is, of course, not to save the Earth. Rather, he needs an excuse to justify his outrageous plan to colonise Mars, and so he appeals to the preservation of, in his word, ‘humanity’. But Musk’s concept of humanity excludes most living and breathing humans.”
“We are surprised that Musk’s plan has drawn only limited critical engagement. Most of the critical response has been to his technical assumptions and plans.”
“Who are we to tell Musk – or any private citizen, for that matter – what he should or shouldn’t do with his money? In US society, to question societal norms of conspicuous consumption, no matter how juvenile or vain, is frowned upon.”
“We are his fellow citizens, fellow humans, and we don’t want people to follow in the direction Musk is leading. He could lead others to help those suffering now, to get involved in addressing the actual problems before us. There’s no shortage of them.”
“If Musk prefers the planetary scale of action, he could lead people to preserve our single planetary resource, also known as Earth, the only planet we will probably ever have.”
“Some might justify investments in a mission to Mars by arguing that the US space program in general, and NASA’s achievements with Apollo in particular, brought tangible economic and even greater symbolic benefits. The symbolic payoff is clear: nothing seems to pique a spirit of wonder, curiosity, ambition and humility quite like space exploration and discovery. The economic payoffs are evident, ostensibly, in ‘spinoff’ or ‘spillover’ innovations. Up to 80 per cent of the technologies created for NASA programs might have ended up in the domestic economy. Just visit NASA’s searchable database to learn more about the spinoffs that NASA is eager to publicise to taxpayers.”
“But as a way of making decisions about research and development, and science and technology investment, the ‘spinoff’ publicity campaign reveals its own weakness.”
“Quite simply, why not address the existential problems facing our society and our fellow humans directly? We don’t need trickle-down science.”
“A public research agenda aimed squarely at solving real problems – for example, an attempt to reduce the cost and improve the quality of inexpensive housing – would easily produce useful technologies that exceed the 80 per cent mark. ‘Spillover’ is a poor, indeed bizarre and indefensible justification. Let’s simply unfurl the metaphor. People around you are thirsty, very thirsty, perhaps even dying of thirst. You have a lot of clean water. What to do? Should you fill a giant cistern until it overflows onto the ground, spilling over, and let the thirsty scramble to lick up the water? There’s a simpler, better way.”
“Mahatma Gandhi said: ‘Action expresses priorities.’ Our concerns are moral concerns about the priorities that Musk is articulating and that his followers are echoing.”
“The moral detachment of the plan signifies a deeper pathology that afflicts our culture of innovation, and celebrates innovators such as Musk, who are all too eager to play with gadgets and leave their fellow humans behind.”
“The future was supposed to answer questions such as: Where is my jetpack? Where is my flying car? But it is still possible to pose different questions: Where is our economic bill of rights? Who will be the next Ralph Abernathy? Who will be our Gil Scott-Heron? Shouldn’t we be ashamed for having given up on protests against inequality? Shouldn’t we be ashamed for spending so much time and effort to raise money to put Whitey on Mars? How do we get our technology leaders to focus on real societal problems, including those faced by the least fortunate among us?”
“Until we are able to answer these questions collectively, Elon’s moral failures are outpaced only by our own.”