Gray Mars: Space Exploration In The Hands Of The Billionaires

If billionaires are the ones leading us to Mars, we’re better off not going

By Eli Horowitz

Over the past decade, a curiously inverted ideology has spread across the political spectrum. From American conservatives to Canadian leftists to Chinese government officials, every faction has its adherents. What unites these disparate elements is, in a word, Mars. Despite everything that divides them, a rising chorus of voices has somehow united in the belief that our dead, red neighbor is, in fact, a symbol of life.

The Christian conservative James Poulos describes Mars as an “attractive” target that “invites our love” and “arous[es] our eros,” leaving us “renewed.” Charles Rubin, a less religious (and less easily aroused) colleague of Poulos’, proposes Mars settlement as an answer to Earthly “eco-catastrophe.” Writing in the pages of the socialist magazine Jacobin, Leigh Phillips argues that we’re obliged to pursue Martian expansion in order to satisfy the “awesome responsibility” of maintaining “intelligent life” in the universe. President Xi Jinping of China believes that the “shared future for humanity” includes Martian exploration. And so on and so forth; everywhere you look, someone has something nice to say about Mars.

Beneath and behind these poetic turns of phrase, lurks a kaleidoscopic, semi-overlapping, sometimes self-contradicting pattern of interests and -isms. Poulos blames the left for spreading a kind of character-sapping fatalism that he calls “anti-humanism.” Phillips, on the other hand, blames the right for pretending that corporate executives can be trusted to build a better future when their imagination doesn’t even extend beyond the next quarterly report. Yet despite occupying opposite sides of the political spectrum, both men see themselves as defenders of the Enlightenment and both promote Mars as the cure for the “dread” and “malaise” that seem to haunt the Anglophone world. Rubin, the conservative, believes that space skeptics are on the wrong side of history and will be judged accordingly by future generations. The socialist Phillips derides neoliberal capitalism and then promises that space will be a wellspring of economic growth and profit. Meanwhile, as the Americans point fingers, Xi is trying to build Rubin’s future as part of his authoritarian, nationalist take on Phillips’s public-sector philosophy. It’s as if Mars is an ideological inkblot test, one to which we have collectively answered “all of the above.”

The modern progenitor of this intellectually chaotic movement is arguably Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has published a startling array of Mars-focused writings and whose Mars Society has been pushing for crewed missions since 1998. Unlike the polished public partisans who have responded to his vision, Zubrin is basically just an overzealous nerd. Where others step back to describe the bold hues of vast moral struggles, he zooms all the way in, the better to parse the various shades of gray—he seemingly lives in a world of budgets, flowcharts, itemized lists, and statistical models. Although he does allow himself a rhetorical flourish every now and again, the closest thing he has to an ethos can be found in his 2003 testimony to the Commerce Committee of the U.S. Senate. “Mars,” he said, “is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.” Or, to read between the lines: “I believe I can make Mars work and I’m excited to make Mars work, therefore we must make Mars work.”

But if there was ever a time when Zubrin was the movement’s poster child, that moment has long since passed. By now, the public face of Marsward immigration is the same as the public face of electric cars, crypto tweets, and late-capitalist buffoonery. We speak, of course, of Elon Musk.

Walking On Broken Glass

Musk has been toying with the idea of Mars since at least 2001, when he talked about landing an experimental greenhouse there. These days, he prefers to talk about launching humans instead of plants. Like Phillips, he argues that “​​we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness.” Like Rubin, he proposes that we use Mars as a backup planet in case of a catastrophe here at home. But he’s like Zubrin most of all, in that he routinely makes the leap between liking an idea and insisting that the entire rest of the world bend over backwards to play along.

Before further elaborating on his connection to the red planet, it’s worth remembering just who we’re talking about. This is the guy who has sworn that self-driving cars were just around the corner every year since 2014. He’s the guy who hyped up the idea of super-strong car windows immediately before those same windows were shattered live on camera. He’s the guy whose anti-traffic tunnel got jammed with traffic, who predicted that the U.S. would be COVID-free by April of 2020, and who prefers to slander experts rather than engage with them. So when he swears that humans will set foot on Mars within five years or predicts that he’ll retire there, it’s worth taking his words with several fist-sized grains of salt.

More importantly, when even he has to admit that populating Mars will require a disturbing amount of suffering and death, it’s worth pausing to make sure we understand just how bad it might get.

Is There Life On Mars?

By and large, the romantic image of space travel has obscured the reality. If, like Zubrin, you prefer technical explanations, consider the scenario that a team of MIT researchers laid out when they evaluated a proposed Mars mission in 2015. Assuming that everything goes right on the journey, settlers will arrive safely, set up their habitats successfully, and begin to grow their own food. After a month, they’ll have lettuce. After two months, they’ll have wheat.

But before another two weeks go by, the excess oxygen built up by the astronauts’ agriculture will cause a cascade of failures in their life support systems, leaving them with nothing to do but watch one another suffocate. By the end of the third month, Mars will have gone from a settlement to a cemetery.

By the end of the third month, Mars will have gone from a settlement to a cemetery.

But even MIT’s sobering assessment undersells the matter. At best it tells us what a Martian settlement would be. It doesn’t tell us what Mars would mean for the people who travel there. For them, to live on Mars would be to live silently in the shadowed recesses of Death’s own house, knowing at every moment that the slightest misstep will bring the scythe down. How thin would the margin for error be? On Mars, your compatriots would mix your blood into their bricks to ensure that the walls are strong enough to keep you alive. When you died, they would liquefy your body and use the runoff to grow their crops.

The scenario outlined by MIT is just one of many ways to die on our neighboring planet. If it doesn’t choke you to death inside your own habitat, Mars could easily kill you with its temperature, its atmosphere, its exposure to radiation, its dust and soil, its gravity, or a thousand other things. As such, survival would be a matter of constant, grinding work. Any serious injury or illness would mean death. Every death would threaten the entire settlement. And the entire reward for one day’s survival would be nothing more than another day of the same physical and emotional exhaustion, the same confinement, the same pain, and the same autumnal chill, all under the same hopeless, 4-AM-colored sky.

A Free Planet

Yet as brutal as that sounds, Musk’s vision of Martian life promises to be even worse. He has proposed using (or should we say “threatened to use”?) indentured servitude to increase the population of his hypothetical settlement. Here on our home planet, that would be illegal. But SpaceX, Musk’s de facto personal space program, has already declared that “Earth-based government[s]” will have no authority over its Martian activities. Mars, it says, is a “free planet.”

This is hardly out of character. Both personally and in his business dealings, Musk has a habit of behaving as though he’s a “free planet” unto himself. Tesla is a hotbed of alleged misconduct and abuse. Former SpaceX workers claim that the company practices a “culture of sexual harassment.” Meanwhile, the serial CEO has been described as manipulative, physically and verbally abusive, “sadistic,” and subject to fits of “total and complete pathological sociopathy.” Even the rhesus macaque monkeys used in experiments at Musk’s brain-tech startup Neuralink were allegedly subjected to “extreme suffering.” Admittedly, drivers at his Boring Company do call him a “great leader.” Then again, that’s what he requires them to say.

It’s one thing for Musk to be a sweaty, fumbling blowhard here at home, where the rules are rigged in his favor. For those who venture off-planet, however, things will be very different. There are no stock markets to manipulate on Mars, no interviewers to credulously regurgitate his spin, and no room for his patented brand of hotheaded, dick-swinging arrogance. If he runs his settlement on the same schedule as the (occasionally homicidal) “self-driving” Teslas that he’s been promising for eight years, it will fail and everyone there will die. If he builds it with “shatterproof” glass that breaks at the slightest tap, it will fail and everyone there will die. If he operates it like he operates the Neuralink facility at which one in every five experimental monkeys died… well, you can guess the rest.

Space Fraudity

The fundamental problem is that the only success story that Elon Musk cares about is Elon Musk. Unlike James Poulos, Charles Rubin, Leigh Phillips, and Xi Jinping, he has no moral or political ideals that might compel him to reckon with his mistakes. He doesn’t even have Robert Zubrin’s obsessive need to do all the calculations himself to make sure that they come out right. All he has is an overactive imagination and the emotional maturity of a five-year-old.

When someone points out that his ideas have failed, he throws a tantrum and calls them names. (Remember “pedo guy”?) When one of his toy projects begins to bore him, he allows it to languish and collapse. Just look at the hyperloop, the futuristic-sounding (but perhaps impracticable) transit idea that he came up with around 2013. Even as other organizations continue to push the idea forward, Musk’s latest version of the hyperloop is a tunnel. Not a hypertunnel, mind you. Just a tunnel. To put it lightly, the implications for his space program are bleak. At best, a Muskite settlement would be a semi-functional prison camp maintained only by regular infusions of fresh laborers; think of an Amazon warehouse where no one ever gets to leave and the only way to resign is to die. At worst, he would simply launch one doomed mission after another, with each new crew landing, disembarking, and then immediately recycling the corpses of the previous crew.

In short, we have every reason to believe that an off-world settlement run according to the erratic whims of a hostile megalomaniac like Musk would fail. (For the record, Jeff Bezos falls into this category, too, even though he prefers space stations to Martian outposts.) More to the point, it would deserve to fail. As Mar Escalante put it in these very pages, as long as people like Musk are at the helm, “we will carry the seeds of our undoing everywhere we go.”

So he’s rich. So what? It’s already hard enough to deal with Musk here on Earth, especially if you’re unlucky enough to work for him. To sign up as one of his space monkeys would be an act of sheer self-loathing.

Mars has been a dream for sci-fi writers and would-be explorers for decades. But once actual humans go out into actual space, they’ll need a lot more than empty promises, untested prototypes, marketing gimmicks, Twitter tantrums, and spicy memes. If our narcissistic billionaire overlords represent humanity’s best chance at carrying the delicate flame of life out into the universe, then we might as well resign ourselves to darkness.

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