I believe that Trump’s US Space Force uniforms, alongside widespread talk on X and beyond of colonizing Mars and other impossible celestial feats, constitute the final frontier of the “culture wars”. Over the past few years, I have watched a new strain of delusional xenophobia quietly brewing in science-fiction online subcultures, and then begin to percolate through political conversation. It has now borne its putrid fruit.

After gaining some fame as the author of “far-future evolutionary fiction”, you might think it strange that I do not share the current unbridled optimism about the so-called “enterprising spirit of humanity” conquering the galaxy. There are two main reasons for my skeptical attitude: one is merely practical, the other is ideological.

Let us first consider the practical unlikelihood of “colonizing Mars”. The true believers on X speak of building cities on Mars or even terraforming the Red Planet — that is to say, using technology (somehow) to render it habitable to human beings. But in my opinion, the task is flat-out impossible. I wish this wasn’t the case, but when one considers the “when rubber hits the road” logistics of the whole deal, even supposedly basic terraforming is simply not feasible on Mars. Even if you somehow had the technology to find asteroids, crash them into Mars, wait for centuries for the resulting storm of debris and crashed ice to settle down, then spent some more time somehow brewing a breathable atmosphere out of the resulting murk — as die-hard advocates propose — the atmosphere of Mars is just too weak. Even if you pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, the oxygen would seep into space within a few centuries. You’d have to constantly import air just to keep the whole thing going. And it would take so long to import. The closest Mars gets to Earth is over 54 million kilometers away. In comparison the Moon is a little over 384,000 kilometers away.

Could it be that even Elon Musk, the greatest proponent of colonizing Mars, has finally realized this? In 2017, he stated he felt “fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me… Then build up the base, starting with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, and even bigger. And yeah, over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.” As late as 2025 he was doubling down on his claims, stating that he was “going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” But earlier this year, he changed tack, announcing that “for those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years”. Yet even if Musk is beginning to face reality, many of his devotees on X still refuse to.

I’m not ruling out the possibility of temporary bases on the Moon or maybe even Mars, but big cities where humans live for generations are impossible for logistical reasons. There’s also the temporal and organizational angle, which is rarely considered in these fast, wet dreams of technological achievement. Even if terraforming was logistically viable, we are talking about centuries-long, very resource-intensive commitments here. Now, look at the current state of the world: as things stand, we lack the social organization for cooperative endeavors that last more than a century. I don’t think even nation states can survive those chasms of time unscathed.

Some of the longest-enduring societies on Earth were primitive neolithic cities. Catalhoyuk in Anatolia lasted unchanged for 2,000 years, and matrilineal lines lived in the same place, sometimes for dozens of generations. This may show that enduring forms of social organization are indeed possible, but the sheer atavistic conservatism that enabled this resilience is directly at odds with the “space frontier” mindset. This line of thinking could inspire weapons-grade science fiction, featuring culturally-stunted neolithic farmers working — or being orchestrated from behind the scenes by a caste of hidden elites? — to build towards an off-world colony. But this would have no relation whatsoever to reality.

Then there’s the question of money. Imagine, somehow, that such an effort gets underway. A company, or more likely, a nation, starts launching asteroid-catcher ships. They seek, locate, and wrangle an asteroid, and in eight decades, they finally bring it in — whether to crash it into Mars for a terraforming effort, or to mine it outright for resources. But by then, the company funding the effort might not exist anymore. The government backing it could be gone. The very timetables involved with planetary terraforming are diametrically opposed to the disruptive, extractive capitalists who usually go about spouting such schemes. How are you going to pay for your Mars base over a centuries-long timespan? With company shares? Government bonds?

But don’t worry, such a scheme wouldn’t work under communism either. Not even the hardcore Chinese or Soviet varieties. Nothing short of a knowing, targeted abnegation of reason — perhaps in the form of a brain-washing religious cult — could force human beings to commit to a singular, non-immediate-reward-offering cause for so long.

Yet even the madness of a Mars colony seems level-headed compared to the ludicrous and much-hyped notion of a space megastructure. Popularized initially by Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, and marinated in the minds of more recent generations by the Halo game franchise, the most popular space megastructure vision is a ring-world — a band of solid material extending like a ribbon as long as the orbit of a planet around a sun. Theoretically, such a structure could offer a habitable space up to a billion times the surface area of Earth. Make the ring into a solid shell, and you get what’s called a Dyson sphere. Or make a slightly smaller cylinder sealed at both ends, rotate it to get gravity via centrifugal force and you get an O’Neill cylinder. This latter concept was popularized by Arthur Clarke and Genty Lee’s Rama series, and is usually touted as a workable design for an interstellar spaceship. There are even wilder ideas out there — extend the cylinder into a vast hollow spaghetti strand and you get a topopolis. Wrap that spaghetti around star clusters and you get a galactic topopolis!

These concepts make for some incredible “playgrounds of the mind” — and stories written about them are some of the best in the genre. However, even if the energy sources and tools to make them were available (they aren’t, and will never be, but read on), the sheer tensile strengths needed to keep such structures intact would mean that the raw material of ring-worlds or O’Neill cylinders would need to be as strong as the force that binds atomic nuclei together. That is just another way of saying that it is physically impossible.

Faced with facts, the space fantasist’s usual retort is to blurt out that oft-prattled half-truth: “they thought powered flight was impossible, too!” If you spar with them online, this particular response is so predictable that it feels like the unthinking reflex of some distasteful frog, flashing aposematic colors to potential predators. You prod them just to see it. The truth of the matter is that powered flight was seen as a distinct possibility from 18th-century Montgolfier balloons onwards — perhaps even earlier since birds fly. The naysayers’ claims have reached us simply because they were preposterous, even in their time.

Techno optimists believe that “tech” will solve any problem if applied, or argued for, hard enough. To them, everything is an engineering problem, or else an attitude one. They are right that humanity accomplished a monumental spurt of technological growth during the 20th century — but believing that “technology” is some miracle panacea that will keep making everything better and faster is akin to believing that a fast-growing toddler will be taller than a house when he is 20 years old. Almost by its very nature, growth stops. Technological plateaus are very real, and from a vantage point of “making life multiplanetary” we will always be on one.

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Nevertheless, there are still plenty of naive people who believe that space colonies and megastructures are not only feasible, but also inevitable. Any casual sweep on X reveals unintentionally hilarious, cock-sure examples. I can’t help but wonder whether people like “Lunar Citizen” or “Space Koala” honestly believe in the delusional bullshit they are spewing? Or is it simply “signal boosting” aimed at their peers? Perusing such drivel on X is a strictly “do-not-engage” affair. Few of these characters acknowledge the immensity of the technical challenges that accompany their ideas; point them out, and you are immediately attacked for “spoiling the vibes”, or “spreading pessimism”. For people steeped in the “engineering mindset”, they certainly do rely a lot on vibes.

A strange sentiment animates many true believers. It is ostensibly a “belief in the human spirit” — frequently expressed with the motto “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” — but in practice it is a barely-concealed desire to eliminate “undesirables” who do not share their lethal blend of techno-optimism. The Venn diagram intersection between the “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” crowd, who believe in “humanity’s galactic manifest destiny”, and outright fascists is more crowded than one first imagines.

Let us then dissect their ethos, pinned before us like a nauseating xenomorph with acid for blood. The “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” sentiment (abbreviated as HFY hereafter), in my opinion, is basically a memetic parasite — a mostly fan-made sub-genre attached to science fiction. There are three major components of it.

The first comes from a really weird sub-fandom that developed around a meme based on a villain from James Cameron’s Avatar movies. I’ll quickly summarize: the Avatar series revolves around the “noble savage” world called Pandora, inhabited by the blue-skinned Na’vi. If you live like them and respect nature, the world to you is paradise. Meanwhile, the colonizing humans are portrayed as at best naive and at worst evil. In the end, there is a war between mechanized humans and the Na’vi, and the humans are sent packing back to their dying planet Earth.

The character that appeals most to the HFY sentiment in the Avatar franchise is Colonel Miles Quaritch, a military officer tasked with wiping out the Na’vi resistance so humans can mine their precious floating metals (named “unobtanium” in reference to Fifties engineering slang); or in the second and third films, so that they can suck out the brains of alien whales for an immortality drug. All over X you can see memes depicting the “Quaritch monologue” — a long chunk of text, pasted over badass-looking pictures of Colonel Quaritch. It goes something like this:

“Where are your marvels of engineering, your voyages of discovery, your great insights into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, we built wonders, we made great journeys, we forged epics — you have not. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…”

This quote is not from the film, nor from any of the franchise’s tie-in comics or computer games. Instead, this re-framing of the Avatar story comes from a fan-made Reddit thread from 2014. In this interpretation, Quaritch isn’t a villain serving galactic imperialists — he’s fighting for civilization and human supremacy. He sees the Na’vi not as noble savages, but as actual savages, and in these perverted fan edits, he is the franchise’s unsung hero.

The second component of the HFY spirit comes from the massive Warhammer 40,000 universe. Warhammer depicts a grim future where humanity is constantly at war with space orcs, space bugs, space demons, space pharaoh-zombies, and dozens of other factions. It is, essentially, dark satire. The Imperium of Man, the “pro-human” faction, is written almost like a list of everything not to do when running a society. It is an ultra-theocratic autocracy centered around the worship of an “Emperor of Mankind” kept in a vegetative state. A thousand people are sacrificed a day to keep him alive. The state religion considers associating with aliens to be a serious crime, to be punished with death. Space-age technology exists, but due to religious taboos forbidding innovation, little has been improved, and everything exists in a state of decay. This was a distinctly ironic, British, anti-theist, gallows-humor vision of the world. The earliest Warhammer art is literally indistinguishable from Viz-magazine style, post-punk protest art.

The HFY crowd doesn’t seem to get this. Its angle on Warhammer mostly thrives on fan edits — videos with impressive visuals of Space Marines marching while phonk music plays in the background. Usually, they come with cheesy, over-the-top messages — “Humanity first!”; “Suffer not the xenos to live!” etc. — completely missing the irony. They see the evils of the Imperium as necessary evils, and to them the “virtues” of this society — conformism, xenophobia, the violent will-to-power — are all lessons one can apply to real life. After all, they say, they are all for the advancement of the human species across the galaxy.

It goes without saying that one never meant to cheer for the Imperium of Man. You were supposed to laugh at it — a cynical laugh, sure, but a laugh nonetheless. You were meant to darkly enjoy its absurdity, its bleakness. But I don’t think you were ever meant to use it for political lessons.

The third part of the HFY chimera is based on Starship Troopers — and this brings us back to Trump’s US Space Force uniforms. Starship Troopers was originally a classic sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a dictatorship that takes over the world and then starts a galactic war against giant arachnid bugs. The book followed a man’s experiences in military service, and later on, his recollections of the war; but it was essentially the author’s commentary on the virtues of a meritocratic, militaristic society.

In 1997 the director Paul Verhoeven made a movie based on the book. But the film was a completely different artifact. Verhoeven didn’t want to adapt the book faithfully — he wanted to satirize it. The film became a cutting commentary on the nature of fascism. The characters start out as bright-eyed kids, but as the war progresses, they slowly morph into cartoonish and very clearly Nazi-coded villains. Any viewer worth his or her salt was meant to despair at how easily war reshapes society.

The film was completely misunderstood by the HFY crowd. To them, Starship Troopers was a call to arms. “Humanity is under threat! Crush the arachnids! Join the fight! Service guarantees citizenship!” The point Verhoeven was making about militarization and fascism was lost on them. The epitome of this sentiment was the 2018 YouTube video, “The Politics of Starship Troopers”, by Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. This immensely popular video, which had over a million views at the time of writing, argues that Verhoeven “misunderstood” Heinlein’s book. Instead of being a caricature of fascism or Nazism, the militaristic, human-centric society portrayed in the book and the movie was “merely” a quasi-libertarian one where people deprived of “meaning” in a lax, amoral, liberal world could “join an institution and really earn their own citizenship… by going out and building the world that they want to see”. When applied to present-day affairs, it’s clear who the “humans” are, and who the “arachnids” would be in the minds of this video’s intended audience. It is, in fact, darkly revealing to notice how stories crafted as entertainment products are now forming the nuclei of political sentiment. It is almost as if social expression has no conventional outlet left.

The sort of people who take Warhammer’s Imperium seriously, who root for Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, who want to see the Mobile Infantry squash bugs in real life, are more often than not the same people who espouse unlimited confidence in colonizing space and erecting megastructures all over the place. They possess the engineer’s fetish for applying unbridled power to solve perceived problems. Yet the trouble is, many of the problems we face today aren’t as straightforward as evil aliens in science-fiction memes. Some of our current troubles may simply be systemic, insurmountable however much power you use. Others, such as the looming threat of large-scale war or a climate-related emergency, may indeed require a level of restriction or hierarchy to solve — but going Space Marines on them will not be a wise approach. As the recent blunder in Iran has shown, these will be situations where cooler heads will need to prevail.

The truth is HFY is less a genre of science fiction than a memetic plague spreading through lower tiers of contemporary sci-fi fandom. It takes random bits from disparate works of military science fiction, strips away their complexity, and reduces their message to “strong-army-man shoots bug; humanity wins; civilization restored — voila!” Every problem is an enemy, every enemy can be destroyed, and sufficient application of force will put everything right. It is reductionist, lacking curiosity and intellectual depth. It brims with a cruel dislike of outliers, or anything that is otherwise “different”. HFY leads to the most dumbed-down distillate of xenophobia one can cook up. Its proponents are spiritually impoverished louts, grasping science fiction from the wrong end. They confirm the quote that is often attributed to Einstein but actually comes from The Medusa and the Snail, the 1979 science book by Lewis Thomas: “Space is infinite. Man’s knowledge of space is finite. The sum of our understanding is not yet sufficient for us to comprehend how vast the dimensions of our ignorance [are].”

Although this group continues to grow, there are signs that it may, at least in part, one day be astroturfed. Google Trends data for “space elevators”, “Mars colonies”, “ring worlds”, and associated topics shows a sudden upsurge in popularity in the last two years. This may have been caused by the X algorithm pushing “space optimism”, which in turn might have been used to bolster the public appraisal of Musk’s SpaceX stock earlier this year. The company turned out to be grossly overvalued, and recently its stock prices tanked — liquefying the pipe dreams (and the hard-earned cash) of the space bro crowd. The best laid plans of mice and men… And yet for now, HFY continues to rule X.

One of the greatest, but sadly lesser-known speculative-evolution artists is Karl Kofoed. In a career spanning years, he built up a dazzling universe of illustrated ecosystems and inhabited worlds through Heavy Metal magazine’s regular “Galactic Geographic” feature, which was later adapted into book form as the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003: Earth Edition. The most advanced race in the Galactic Geographic universe is a species of God-like sophonts called the WO. These beings are powerful enough to forge matter into pure energy, and erect megastructures thousands of kilometers in dimension. The most remarkable aspect of the WO, however, is the fact that they never spread beyond their home world. This is a rare thing in science-fiction literature, where off-world colonies and space empires are a dime-a-dozen. By being good stewards of their home planet, the WO are able to extend the lifespan of their civilization for hundreds of millions of years, and in doing so, advance considerably. Rather than being an obstacle to progress, their focus on their home planet was the key to their God-like power.

A pretty good lesson for all incorrigible expansionists, HFY rubes, and doe-eyed techno-fascists, don’t you think? The neat thing about science fiction literature is that it is vast — and within its gaudy halls there are as many (probably more) parables for integrity and hope than there are for the dumb, boyish lust for power.

Regardless of whether Musk does secure his full payout, when someone finally becomes the world’s first trillionaire, odds are it’ll be him. When that happens, his wealth would rival or exceed the GDPs of Portugal, Greece, New Zealand, and Hungary combined. As he’s already shown, Musk has the means to influence any political campaign in his adoptive country. But his immense wealth also allows him to astroturf political movements on virtually any global issue. Witness, if nothing else, his apparent support of Tommy Robinson in Britain, echoed by similar enthusiasms from Paris to Berlin.

Should one man control this much wealth, and thus have the power to tilt the scales of global politics at will? Regardless of your answer, it’s striking how much access Musk’s staggeringly deep pockets secured him on Capitol Hill. Politics moves so fast now that the specifics are easy to forget. But the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wasn’t just about advice or tech contracts — though Musk received those as well — but deciding whether government agencies deserved to live or die. Within months of the election, key civil service departments were gutted under Musk’s watch, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees fired via the vagaries of a proprietary algorithm and Musk’s cadre of 20-something tech graduates.

If DOGE was a characteristically juvenile nod to Musk’s meme-lord sensibilities — and if the Musk-Trump pact has lately acquired the will-they-won’t-they trappings of a Nineties romcom — their relationship is nonetheless one of the great turning points in American history. After all, it ultimately represents the de facto takeover of the federal government by the world’s wealthiest man, not merely for moneymaking, but to ideologically reshape it in Musk’s preferred image.

What is this new Muskian ideology he’s imposing on America? Like many on the American Right, Musk puts on a good show of believing in the mythology of classical liberalism and small government, while also cloaking himself in the aesthetics of techno-libertarianism. In truth, though, the ideological roots of his worldview go deeper and darker. Beneath that meme-saturated branding lies a politics shaped as much by late 19th-century Social Darwinism as by any genuine commitment to “liberty” or open markets, all leavened by a healthy reliance on government backing.

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To put it differently, Musk adheres to a brand of Social Darwinism, imposed from the top down. Think small government for you — and the working-class slobs you struggle alongside — but big government for them, the rightful rulers of the universe. Shortly after ensconcing himself at the White House, wandering its hall like an awe-struck child, Musk landed a $5.9 billion US Space Force contract, as well as a $200 million deal to implement xAI in the Defense Department. That’s echoed by an expanded SpaceX contract, one valued at perhaps $4 billion. The optics, of course, are damning. But more than that, these arrangements speak to the billionaire’s fundamental reliance on state munificence.

Not that Musk is only concerned about economics. Notwithstanding his large and obscure number of children, he often acts online like an angry incel — paranoid and petulant to the core. Over the years, Musk has entertained more than a few white supremacist narratives on his X feed. Though he seems to have once attended an anti-Apartheid concert, his South African upbringing may also have encouraged him to worry about racially charged civil strife. Due to his omnipresence online, certainly, he has legitimized fringe white-supremacist rhetoric that was once relegated to the fringes of cyberspace: witness the growing popularity of Groypers and other “black-pilled” race-based groups among a subset of Gen Z.

The amplification of these far-Right ideologies could prove to be one of the most consequential global shifts of the coming decade. Yet in a horseshoe-like twist, Musk’s reactionary paranoia also coexists with an unshakeable belief in radical futurism — from intergalactic colonies to brain implants. Transhumanism and extreme technophile utopianism — not typically labeled “Right-wing” — pervade nearly everything Musk offers. Whether it’s boring massive underground tunnels, apparently meant to “solve” car traffic, to manufacturing humanoid robots to replace low-skill laborers, Musk’s projects would have horrified traditional British conservatives from Oakeshott to Burke.

Yet amid this rush of contradictory ideological currents, it’s perhaps Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, purportedly as a failsafe for Earth’s presumed collapse, that arguably represents the man in full. That’s starkest when it comes to his futurism. In an age of Icarian sci-fi projects like Saudi Arabia’s ludicrous Neom scheme, Musk’s space venture is the most extravagant techno-utopian fantasy of them all, even as the man himself has apparently convinced large swathes of the public that Martian colonies are not just feasible but actually existentially necessary.

Aside from materializing childhood Star Trek fantasies, it’s hard to find a compelling reason for such a quixotic mission to the fourth planet from the sun. Even assuming it’s possible to land a single human — much less the number needed to “colonize” the planet — the cost of the project would likely be in the neighborhood of $1 billion per person, for a total of $1000 trillion. That kind of outlay, all in a country without universal healthcare or decent public transit, would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Nor is funding the only problem here. Mars is, on average, over 225 million kilometers from Earth. Traveling there would take a minimum of seven to nine months of space travel— trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft. Anyone lucky enough to survive the journey would have to bring with them all the air, water, and food they needed, not just for the space voyage itself but for the rest of their lives.

All the while, life on Mars would resemble camping on an active volcano: permanently toxic, obscenely dangerous, and deeply unnatural. Once Mars mission astronauts arrived, these aspiring settlers would be forced to live an Antarctic-like existence, completely isolated from all normal aspects of human geospatial, social, and emotional life. If nothing else, there’s a good reason why the real Antarctica has no permanent settlements — no one can stand living there without losing their ever-loving mind. Now imagine that kind of existence, except 90% of it is underground and there’s no coming back.

Musk obviously knows all these details, yet remains completely undaunted. And it’s here, I’d argue, that his inverted kind of Social Darwinism comes to the fore. Notwithstanding his obscene personal wealth, a thoroughgoing Martian colony would necessarily require epic amounts of government funding — miserable living conditions on the Red Planet or continued squalor on the Blue Planet be damned. And if Musk truly believes in the necessity of humanity becoming an “interplanetary species”, he ought to then offer himself up as one of Mars’ first human residents. Of course that’ll never happen. Instead he’ll sucker poor, naïve — and almost certainly desperate — souls into doing it for him.

That’s obvious enough from his behavior here on Earth. For one thing, Musk is virulently anti-labor, once saying he not only disagrees with the necessity of trade unions, but even the very idea. Among other things, he claims unions are a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing” that “create negativity in a company.” For another, he has got into ugly disputes with Tesla janitors trying to unionize, while also being found guilty by the US National Labor Relations Board — a notoriously weak agency compared to similar bodies elsewhere — for laying off hundreds of unionized workers in retaliation for their collective bargaining efforts.

Combined with his enthusiasm for red-blooded states like Texas, which has far laxer labor laws than spots like California, and it’s clear that a large part of his affinity for his adoptive nation is those aspects of American “exceptionalism” that align most with his Social Darwinist ideals.

Along these lines, it’s quite telling that unlike past industrial tycoons, Musk has also no major charitable operations. Even during the notoriously callous Gilded Age, figures like Andrew Carnegie preached that the ultra-wealthy had a duty to give away large portions of their money to the public. Many of that era believed their good fortune required social contribution. Musk, in contrast, sees such efforts as unnecessary — or worse, counterproductive. The few charities he does fund are either self-serving, like building schools and infrastructure near SpaceX facilities, or else engaged in other dubious practices. His eponymous foundation only donated $100,000 in 2024, and that to a libertarian think tank. Musk doesn’t even appear to grasp the basic function of most philanthropy: pretending to care.

Such results-focused brutality arguably hints at yet another current in Musk’s ideological bloodstream. In a funny way, technophile futurists like him and Peter Thiel arguably have more in common with Marxist-Leninists than they know. Both regard their political opponents as victims of “false consciousness” — unable to grasp the “scientifically” inevitable direction of history. Any dissent is seen not as disagreement, but as clear proof of ideological delusion. Their version of Progress is treated as inescapable and morally righteous. To question it is to endanger humanity itself. Thiel recently went so far as to liken critics of AI and technological acceleration to apocalyptic figures, and perhaps even Antichrists.

Musk is obviously no Stalin or Pol Pot. But like the undemocratic masters of the 20th century, he surrounds himself with sycophants, while believing that no one could possibly know more than him. When confronted with his failures, he also exhibits the same brand of epistemic totalitarianism — either denying or ignoring shortcomings and continuing to insist on his own revolutionary vision defining all legitimate knowledge. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Musk did not buy Twitter to “restore free speech”. He bought Twitter to shape the narrative in his preferred image, providing free speech to his preferred groups and their preferred narratives. Like a true Enlightenment ideologue, with no acceptance of the limits of the human experience, Musk, like Marx before him, believes in truth with a capital “T”.

One good example here is Musk’s efforts to develop xAI, with the company hunting for “political bias” experts to ensure its large-language model is stripped of all supposed bias from its training modules. Whatever he might claim, genuine “impartiality” is impossible. Just as with academic peer review, choosing what constitutes a “non-biased expert” is itself an ideological act. Postmodernists were completely correct in this sense: no one is capable of decoding human society without bias. But like the Marxists of old, Musk’s supreme faith in scientism and rationalist pseudo-objectivity is his greatest intellectual failing.

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Due to his South African birth, Musk cannot become US president. But, as he’s already shown, he can clearly buy unprecedented government sway. More to the point, there are signs he wants to formalize this influence by creating his very own political party. A few months ago, when the president he helped install grew tired of his presence, Musk threw a tantrum and announced the launch of his own political movement, the so-called “American Party”.

The debut of Musk’s party appears to be on hold, though, with its launch being used as a stick to prod the GOP towards anti-statist, low “entitlement” policies — the same Social Darwinist policies Musk believes must inevitably improve society. The American Party threat is rarely discussed, yet represents an important component in explaining why the GOP continues to hold the “small government” line in the ongoing shutdown of the US government, now a month old and counting. That American Party name is itself a highly telling moniker since it was last used by the extremely violent, ethno-nationalist Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.

The danger, then, isn’t just Musk’s erratic behavior or his unchecked ego. It’s the precedent he’s set. A centi-billionaire — well on his way to trillionaire status — with no democratic mandate and no governing experience now wields unprecedented influence over both the American state and civic discourse. He controls one of the largest social media platforms, and has been allowed to fire government employees at will, treating American society as a sandbox for his own fantastical experiments. For Musk, society isn’t a fragile ecosystem. It’s a plaything for his brilliance to break and rebuild at whim.

Musk hardly started the trend of the ultra-wealthy trying to hijack the US government, but he’s also taking it to dramatically new heights, setting a precedent that’s being followed by tycoons from Bill Ackman to Bernard Marcus. In the 2024 election cycle alone, 100 American billionaires together spent some $2.6 billion in “donations”. To put that into perspective, a minimum-wage worker would need to work for over 174,000 years — and start during the last Ice Age — simply to gross that same figure. It goes without saying, of course, that this trend could yet have disastrous consequences for the average American, with millions feeling their votes don’t count and that whatever gains they secured during the 20th century are already slipping away.

As for Musk himself, the nearer-term danger is less that he’s a hubristic technophile huckster or a deluded space-faring Don Quixote. It’s that, like Stalin, he can afford to keep being wrong — forever. With wealth at this unprecedented scale, he can act, fund, fire, and build without opposition. And, if liberal democracy relies on key shared understandings, his outsized influence might signal something worse than just the rise of authoritarian wealth. Rather, it could ultimately herald a breakdown in our attachment to our mother planet and thus, the conditions for human flourishing. What an ironic “scientific” legacy that would be.

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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By Jacob Howland

Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

The Emperor and Darth Vader may be wrong about a lot of things, but they are not wrong about this. NASA needs a purpose, one that’s worthy of the costs and risks of human spaceflight. That goal can only be sending humans to Mars. This is so because Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.

Let’s start with the science. In the beginning, the Earth and Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide — then, Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct, and life emerges naturally from chemistry whenever the conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too, and on millions of other planets throughout our galaxy. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone.

There are other reasons to explore Mars. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the 21st century and many to follow. If we find life on Mars, we will be able to discover whether the DNA-RNA information system utilized by all life on Earth is universal, or whether it is just one of many possibilities. A different system could offer revolutionary engineering possibilities, as great in comparison to DNA-RNA as silicon computers are to those based on vacuum tubes, electric relays or mechanical Babbage machines.

A humans-to-Mars program would also inspire millions of young Americans to develop their scientific talents, generating vast amounts of intellectual capital. In the Sixties, the Apollo program doubled the number of American science and engineering graduates, whose innovations (such as the computer revolution) have since repaid the nation the cost of the program many times over. Like individuals, nations grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not.

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The business-as-usual space establishment claims that its Artemis program, which aims for a return to the Moon, is comparable to a mission to Mars. But this is simply untrue. There are no questions of fundamental scientific interest that can be resolved by exploring the surface of the Moon. Nor will we astonish the world by repeating something we did more than half a century ago.

And then there’s the matter of humanity’s future. Of all the worlds currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement. The Red Planet offers new branches of human civilization the chance to have a fresh start, in a place where the rules haven’t yet been written. Unlike the ultra-dry Moon, Mars has oceanic quantities of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, as well as massive ice glaciers containing as much water as the American Great Lakes. And while the Moon lacks any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen — elements essential for life — Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide and 2.6% nitrogen. With plentiful CO₂ and water, one can grow plants for food and fiber, and make plastics and fuels. Martian water is five times as rich as terrestrial water in deuterium, which is the fuel for fusion reactors. So once fusion power is mastered, Mars will offer infinite energy, allowing its settlers to transform its mineral wealth into steel, pipes, greenhouses, and cities. It will eventually become the natural takeoff point for expeditions to mine the precious metal riches of the asteroid belt.

For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so the Europeans reached it first. But its environment was too impoverished to host more than a few outposts. America, by contrast, would become the home of a vibrant new branch of Western civilization.

The Artemis program’s lack of purpose is further demonstrated by its hardware set, composed as it is of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of random elements, including the SLS heavy-lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Team expendable lunar lander, and a lunar orbiting space station called the Gateway, which together would not enable a coherent mission plan. In fact, most of these hardware elements only exist because there is a constituency that benefits from their funding. The Artemis program is vendor-driven, not purpose driven. A purpose-driven program spends money to achieve goals. A vendor-driven program, like Artemis, does things in order to spend money. We can and must do better.

If America is to once again have a space program worthy of a nation of pioneers, we must act with purpose, with wisdom, and with courage. After all, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were in 1961 to meet President Kennedy’s call to send men to the Moon — and we were there eight years later. To shrink from this challenge would be to declare that we are no longer the people we used to be — and that is a concession America cannot afford to make.

Yet a Mars mission could easily be derailed. Trump and Musk have both defined themselves in hyper-partisan terms. But if the Mars program is seen as a Trump-Musk hobby-horse, it will be canceled as soon as the fortunes of political war shift, as they are certain to do long before the mission is realized. Therefore the proposals advanced by some in the Trump camp to give the program to SpaceX to pursue outside of NASA are not merely unethical (as they would involve the sole-source distribution of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Musk), but suicidally impractical. If the program is to succeed, it must be in the name of America, not Elon Musk.

Furthermore, it needs to be done correctly. SpaceX’s Starship, which claims to be the world’s most powerful reusable launch vehicle, promises to be a terrific asset. But Musk insists that it should be the only vehicle used for the mission. While a Starship upper stage could be refueled on orbit by tanker Starships, enabling it in theory to fly from Earth orbit to Mars, its 100-ton mass makes it suboptimal for use as an ascent vehicle. It would make far more sense to develop and use a similar but much smaller vehicle — a “Starboat” if you will — to travel between the surface of Mars and its orbit. Starship plus Starboat could enable highly efficient missions to Mars. But this will require a program leadership capable of speaking truth to power.

Technicalities aside, Musk’s vision of a Martian settlement is also seriously misconceived. He has propounded the idea that thousands of Starships should be used to rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis which will preserve “the precious light of consciousness” after the human race on Earth is destroyed in the near future (by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway AI, or the woke mind virus — the plot line varies). The idea is apparently based on Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy, Foundation, in which a group of scientists is sent to the far-flung planet Terminus (also Musk’s name for his colony), so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilization. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.

For one thing, you can’t just dump one million people on Mars. Starships will only be able to carry about 100 tons of cargo from Earth to Mars, and it will take six to eight months to perform the transit. This means that a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, then, we’ll need to develop the agricultural and industrial base needed to feed, clothe, and house them. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.

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Furthermore, as Musk should know, no million-person Mars outpost could possibly survive the collapse of human civilization on Earth. Technological civilization requires a vast division of labor. It is unlikely that a society of one million people could produce a good electric wristwatch, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone. The high-tech components of Mars’s most advanced systems will need to be imported from Earth for a very long time.

And besides, the idea that a few will survive on Mars, while billions die on Earth is so morally repulsive that any program foolish enough to adopt it would be doomed. Coated with ideological skunk essence, the mission’s protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Foundation.

We should not go to Mars to desert humanity, but to strengthen humanity. The aim should be to vastly expand humanity’s power to meet all future challenges by making grand scientific discoveries — and yes, in the fullness of time, establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilization. We should not go to Mars to preserve “the precious light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway, as Musk would have it, but to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier. We should not go to Mars to party while the Earth burns, but to prevent Earth from burning altogether by showing that there is no need to fight over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can inhabit new planets. For by doing so, human freedom can expand into the cosmos.

That is the case for Mars.

But it could also turn the final frontier into another zone of hyper-exploitation — a grim possibility probed by Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho’s new political satire set in space, Mickey 17, whose villain is a hybrid of Musk and Donald Trump.

As the SpaceX craft plummeted back to its Florida landing spot, dolphins jumped sweetly out of the water to greet it. The scene was so beautifully cinematic, it could well have served as the opening of Mickey 17. In it, Joon Ho imagines a future that we already live in: where exploited laborers (here referred to as “expendable clones”) serve at the whims of a short-tempered oligarch whose devoted “followers” have eagerly joined his space flight.

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Our protagonist is Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, and since he is essential to the ship’s mission, no one questions his pain and suffering, least of all himself. As he dies over and over in excruciating pain in clone form — his body freezes, he loses a hand, he is poisoned while being tested for a new vaccine — this is treated as routine. He did, after all, sign up for the job. Eager to leave behind his debts on Earth, he confesses with a smile that he might have scrutinized the paperwork more closely. The ship’s onlookers laugh knowingly at each death: silly, sweet Mickey, making all our lives safer, smoother, more efficient.

About 20 minutes into the film, it becomes clear that Joon Ho thought Trump was going to lose the 2024 election. Mark Ruffalo plays the failed congressman Kenneth Marshall, who hosts an inflight reality competition show and was so humiliated by losing his “re-election campaign” that he leaves Earth to colonize space. An attempted assassination only brings him back stronger. As his followers chant the name of their leader, they stick their arms up in the air, one finger pointing at the sky, echoing a Nazi salute (ahem, “Roman salute”). His wife, the unnervingly poised Toni Collette, resembles Melania in the least charitable interpretation. At one point, when her husband is about to kill Mickey, 17 she screams and screams; but it is not for Mickey, rather at the thought of a bullet hole in her lovely carpet.

Bong Joon Ho says the character isn’t inspired by Musk and Trump, but by a range of “dictators we have seen throughout history”, which would be hard to believe even if Marshall’s supporters didn’t wear red MAGA-style baseball hats that say “the one and only”. There’s no Kenneth Marshall in the book the film is based on; the novel’s autocrat, Hieronymus, is more a maniacal military soldier than an eccentric billionaire. But in the movie version, he wants to colonize space, make babies with the women on board with “the ideal genetics”, and he’s constantly throwing tantrums. Sounds pretty familiar.

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Satire succeeds best when it touches a nerve of truth. Parasite, Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning film from 2019, exploded the fantasy of upward mobility by showing an upper-class family’s vampiric relationship to their servants. Its bloody conclusion is a depressing catharsis of just how little hope there is for improving your chances. But where Parasite benefited from a subtle touch — the social critique unfolded gradually to reveal a horrifying picture of the real world — Mickey 17 can be too on-the-nose, at times resembling Saturday Night Live at its flaccid worst.

The Marshall character slides between impressions of Musk and his ostensible government boss, Trump. Writing Mickey 17 three years ago, Joon Ho couldn’t have known how powerful a role Musk would be playing in the current administration, but his determined plans to colonize space have long been clear. The SpaceX boss’s ultimate mission is to “occupy Mars” and develop a city of 1 million people there in the next two to three decades. He has volunteered his own sperm to get the population going, and he wants to retire on the Red Planet.

Though space dominance has long been a goal of American foreign policy, most crucially in the Cold War, Musk isn’t aiming for any kind of national leverage: he wants to leave Earth behind to make a new society centered on himself. It’s a “backup” plan for humanity, but it will be a colony of children born from his own genetic material.

Musk isn’t alone. Instead of countries vying for extraterrestrial supremacy, Musk’s foremost space rival is Bezos, who is set to launch a bizarre all-female rocket to space this spring with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, and Katy Perry on board. Bezos hopes to industrialize space, moving the manufacturing concerns “that stress Earth” away from it. Both men have built huge company towns in Texas, where thousands of workers live to build their rockets.

Musk, meanwhile, wants to bio-engineer a new version of human that can survive in Mars’s burning temperatures, an idea close to the new cloning technology that props up Joon Ho’s movie world. For Joon Ho’s Musk-Trump composite character, Kenneth Marshall, the impulse to “purify” humanity can only be achieved by abandoning it, and any successful society requires masses willing to be exploited to get things done.

Like Marshall, who is quick to abandon his promises on Earth for better chances in space, it’s fair to question how invested space fanatics like Musk can be in making American society better, when he hopes to leave it as soon as he can. More likely, he views space as a stellar business opportunity, ripe with untapped resources and with no laws or regulations to get in your way.

What Joon Ho shows us is how powerful figures normalize the exploitation of those who work for them to prop up their ambitions, something Musk is no stranger to. Tesla’s “giga-factories” have been accused of rampant sexual harassment and safety violations, and one lawsuit alleges a worker told his wife “I’m going to die in this factory”. Predictably, Musk thinks trade unions “create negativity in a company”. Bezos, our other keen space pioneer, uses algorithms to push his Amazon workers to breaking point; and those who work in his American factories are regularly, and seriously, injured. This kind of undervalued, exploited labor isn’t born from futuristic scientific experiments or any kind of dystopian future. It’s just ordinary people being walked all over today.

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Yet the filmmaker is too nakedly partisan for his jabs at Musk-Trump to land. Indeed, the Trump-Musk amalgam can often serve as a distraction. The deeper, more productive critique embedded in the film has to do with the mistreatment of nameless multitudes, who damage their bodies and give up their lives so that those in higher social classes can enjoy themselves. We don’t need breakthroughs like cloning to normalize the extreme exploitation of workers, because there are Mickeys all around us.

Asked in a recent interview why even his Korean-language films are so popular all over the world, Joon Ho guessed it is because “except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language”. Storytelling in space can make the familiar feel alien. That’s the brilliance of Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, Alien, which harnesses fear out of the anxiety of pregnancy.

In its best moments, Mickey 17, does the same: by transposing exploitation into futuristic clones, the film indicts the present-day exploitation of our fellow human beings. It’s a worthy reminder that if we leave space — or Earth for that matter — in the unchecked hands of oligarchs, we might end up doing astonishing things, even as we export our worst human instincts: greed, selfishness, and the ability to turn a blind eye.

I’m a space sceptic — rockets don’t move me. Back in 2006, I explored the seedier side of America’s lunar mission in my book, Dark Side of the Moon. It sparked outrage among those space enthusiasts who still cling desperately to Nasa’s glorious myths. And so I concluded that the world is roughly divided into two groups: there are those who care passionately about space and those who don’t give a fig. Men are prominent in the first group, women in the second. Go figure.

Being a space sceptic is a niche profession. This means that my phone rings whenever something important happens in space. Thanks to Musk, it’s been ringing a lot lately. And with the sixth launch of his Starship rocket yesterday, it’ll continue to do so. I care about space — in the sense that I believe that the dangerous fantasies of space moguls need to be exposed. And I still adore the old astronauts like John Glenn, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, all enormously brave men. But I recognise that they were mere pawns in a pointless political battle.

The recent exploits of Musk and Bezos fit into a longer story about celestial utopia. In 1869, Edward Hale published The Brick Moon, a short novel about a massive brick spaceship that is conceived as a navigational aid for those on earth. But a harmonious community, distinct from anything earthbound, quickly evolves within. Gravity was a cruel tyrant that prevented man from achieving true spiritual enlightenment.

President Ulysses Grant called the Brick Moon “the biggest thing since Creation, save for the invention of Bourbon whiskey and the Havana Cigar”. He was probably joking. Exactly 100 years later, President Richard Nixon described the Apollo 11 mission as “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation”. He wasn’t joking. Mature, otherwise intelligent men genuinely believed that Armstrong’s small step was a “giant leap for mankind”. Armstrong himself expressed surprise that the lunar landing didn’t immediately bring the Vietnam War to an end.

According to this gospel of space, if man escaped Earth’s surly clutch, his soul would likewise soar. Earth was, some said, a “lousy planet”, a drag on human fulfilment. The idea was eventually taken up by physicist Gerard O’Neill who in 1981 predicted that a giant community orbiting in space would usher in an age of “perpetual plenty”, eradicating war, famine and poverty. Nasa paid him a large amount of money just to dream of utopia.

This brings us back to Bezos and Musk. Wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Occupy Mars”, Musk is a man who has everything but now wants a planet. It’s not yet clear what deal he has made with Donald Trump in exchange for support during the election — yet my guess is that it involves rockets.

Musk first set out his vision in an article in New Space in 2017. Rather than a serious discussion of interplanetary migration as Musk intended, it reads like a comic book. If you’re seeking profundity, look away now. “It would be quite fun to be on Mars,” he writes, “because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.” He admits that Mars “is a little cold”, (it has a median temperature of -65°C), “but we can warm it up”. And don’t worry about those windstorms that can last for months and which have the abrasive effect of shaving with a power sander. He’s going to fix all that. Musk aspires to be both a 19th-century imperialist and a god. “On the fifth day, Elon created an atmosphere. And it was good.”

Bezos thinks Musk is crazy — for the Amazon founder, turning Mars into a liveable planet is pie in the sky. He prefers instead an expanded version of O’Neill’s vision, with thousands of people living in an “Orbital Reef”. This would eventually expand into a vast conglomeration of connected tubes where trillions of people would live, creating the statistical probability of “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins”. When it comes to dreaming, these guys don’t mess around.

All this might seem exciting to space nuts, but life would have all the romance of a transcontinental flight, except with no destination and no ETA. Reality would be much more mundane than the paradise promised by Musk and Bezos. Residents would breathe recycled air, drink recycled urine and live in perpetual fear of a catastrophic decompression caused by a collision with space debris. Featureless aluminium walls would drip with condensation and the air would smell of Dettol.

Bezos has gone a bit quiet of late, or rather Musk’s exploits with SpaceX have hogged the limelight. And with the latter’s proximity to Trump, we should probably concentrate on what he has in mind. He’s promised to resettle a million people on Mars by 2050, with the first settlers arriving by 2030. Since Mars and Earth are in close synchronisation only once every 26 months, that means that there are only 10 windows of opportunity between 2030 and 2050. He claims that his Starship reusable rocket will be able to transport 100 people or 100 tons of cargo at a time. That suggests 10,000 flights in 10 months, just for the human passengers. Added to that would be an equal number of cargo flights necessary to construct a city on Mars. So, we’re talking roughly 20,000 flights over about 300 days.

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In addition to miners and rocket scientists there would be doctors, lawyers, accountants, sewage workers and pizza chefs. There would also be criminals, since that’s statistically inevitable. Musk figures that a ticket to Mars would initially cost around $500,000, decreasing to $100,000 over time. This could be paid for with a loan underwritten by SpaceX and paid back by working on the Red Planet. In other words, Musk wants something similar to the 19th-century American company town. His version of utopia consists of a million people in a state of perpetual indentured servitude, paying him for the houses they live in, the air they breathe and the water they drink. I’m reminded of the song “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford:

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.

One wonders what type of person would want to sacrifice Earth’s rich bounty for a life on desolate Mars. The idea would probably attract people either hopelessly deluded or bitterly unhappy. Neither seems like the raw material of a stable community.

At first, these Martian residents would only be able to venture outside their enclosed shelters in spacesuits. Musk plans to fix that, however, by “terraforming” Mars, that is, turning it into an Earth-like environment. By using nuclear explosions, he’ll release the carbon dioxide frozen in the polar regions and, hey presto, there’ll be a weather system, breathable air, oceans, lakes, flora and fauna. Technically, the task might be feasible, but solving climate change on Earth would be a doddle compared to terraforming Mars.

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The big question, it seems, is: what’s the point? Why build a colony on Mars if Earth’s environmental problems could be fixed for a fraction of the cost? Musk claims that humans need to become interplanetary in order to survive as a species. “I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself… there’s always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!” That’s certainly true, but I’m sure there are deeper, more personal motives. One senses that Musk shares that mistaken belief that gravity is a tyrant, that a different world will produce a different human.

That vision seemed preposterous, but rather harmless, when described by Hale. Expressed by Bezos and Musk it seems downright frightening. We know them; we’re familiar with their rapacious labour practices. Tesla and Amazon are not good blueprints for utopia. What these billionaires seem to have in mind is an idiosyncratic paradise free from the laws that constrain them on Earth. They want King Leopold’s Congo, but in space.

When I was a boy, astronauts were my heroes. Their exploits carried me through a difficult decade of riots and war. My dad contributed to the space adventure by making components for the Saturn rocket that took Armstrong to the moon. But then he died an early death, killed by the carcinogenic chemicals he’d once handled. After I became a historian I discovered just how cynical the space race was, how good people were exploited to win a Cold War pissing contest.

Space travel has always been an ego trip; but at least back then there were real heroes who made it fun. Nowadays billionaires, not nations, are at the helm. The once heavenly realm has become an arena of greed and power. The lustre is lost. Musk’s version of utopia is not just cloud cuckoo land. It’s also a nightmare.