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.

Heroes are born in the denial of death. To Ernst Becker, writing in the Seventies, this is the root of human character, and of human heroism. Fearing death, we strive to make meaning, to achieve cosmic significance through that which lies beyond ourselves. Heroes are born in this struggle, yet so too is tragedy — for the cosmic impulse of the hero can come to justify any sacrifice.

Today, Elon Musk would bring humanity to Mars, foster abundance on Earth, and seed intelligence across the stars. To him, we stand alone in the universe — a dim and flickering light of consciousness set amid an endless dark. Bound to a single planet, this light is at risk — and so, using SpaceX, we must settle Mars. Through Tesla, Musk plans to “end scarcity” — to engineer a world free from want, a place of “sustainable abundance” powered by the limitless light of the sun and served by millions of robots. Enabling these transformations will be intelligence — the intelligence of artificial minds, built from and operating within a vast orbital infrastructure of computation. With abundance assured, and bound no longer by the limits of earthly physics, these minds would then be free — free to observe, analyze, and colonize the universe.

Musk’s vision begins and ends in the problem of meaning. Should they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that undergird them. He would birth a new form of power: the AGI platform state. Yet the scale of his ambition makes even this warning seem parochial — for Musk, in truth, aims  to break the fundamental constraints of our existence. In doing so he risks not just humanity, but meaning itself.

We live in an age where the wildest precepts of science fiction have become not only imaginable, but investable. That this is so owes much to Elon Musk. Erratic, distractable, willfully controversial, he is nevertheless an industrial titan, a man who with any one part of his portfolio would have made an enduring mark on the annals of mankind. Through Tesla, he has transformed markets in electric vehicles, solar energy and batteries; through SpaceX, he revolutionized satellites, internet access, and space flight. He owns X, one of the world’s leading social media platforms, and xAI, which leverages X data to build Grok, a leading AI system. With Neuralink, he has transformed the ability of humans to interact with machines, providing hope to immobile and paralyzed people across the world. He was a founder of OpenAI, the creator of the world’s first major AI tool; through Optimus, a Tesla subsidiary, he plans to mass produce and commercialize humanoid robots.

Musk is creating the future — and, to read the statements of his companies, it will be a glorious place. Tesla’s stated mission is the elimination of scarcity via sustainable abundance, a world of “global prosperity”, “human thriving”, and “economic growth shared by all”. To Tesla and to Musk, growth is infinite, and innovation removes constraints. This future will be achieved by nothing less than “redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all” — an extraordinary and, should it come into reality, epoch-making statement of intent. But these dreams of technological liberation, the very real results Musk has already achieved, and the astonishing scope of his ambition, are also creating something else — a vertical stack of power unlike any wielded in human history, and one with the scope to transform the basis of history. The contours of this power structure are increasingly visible through his business deals.

Deal by deal, Musk is refashioning his empire. His companies, previously separate and dispersed, are being consolidated, merged, and floated. At the same time, he is launching new ventures. In 2025, xAI — his AI company, and the owner of Grok — bought X, his social media company. SpaceX, his space flight and satellite business, has now acquired xAI itself.  Sources suggest that the deal valued xAi at $91 billion, and SpaceX at $1 trillion — making it the most valuable private company ever to have existed. On 10 March, Musk announced that X — owned now by SpaceX — is launching a payments platform, xMoney. On the 21st March, Musk announced a further venture — Terafab, a three-way collaboration between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, one dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors. SpaceX — a company therefore combining rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and shortly payments and chips too — is now planning an IPO. With a valuation as high as $2 trillion, this would be the largest IPO in history, and one with heavenly ambitions — for Musk intends to put a million data centers in space.

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A million data centers in space, a sustainably abundant robot future; few things could seem more absurd. A creature of irony, the object and progenitor of innumerable memes, Musk knows how and when to grab attention of his markets, investors and employees. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered — in the short run. He promised autonomous driving by 2019, a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020; Mars colonies by 2022; none of these promises quite came true. Musk bullshits, and Musk overpromises. To focus on this, however, would be a mistake. Like him or loathe him, Musk has a history of effecting transformational commercial change, change driven by grandiose ideas of the future. With Musk, above all, we must judge the man not by what he says, but by what he builds.

Behind Musk’s recent deals is a logic of power and control, a logic we would do well to consider. He is aiming for vertical integration — control of energy generation, of computing infrastructure, of data and the sources of data, of internet connectivity, of transport, and control of manual labor. It is a question of power — energetic power, computational power, and commercial power. Control over each enables the greater growth of the other; taken together, they give him end-to-end control over AI, the basis of AI, and the tools through which AI is expressed. Multi-billion dollar valuations suggest we must take his plans seriously — but taking it seriously suggests a vista far greater, far more alarming in scope, than that conjured by even the most hyperactive investment analyst. Musk is betting not simply on growth — he is betting on the singularity.

Read the news, talk with friends, experiment with Claude or OpenAI; something strange, something singular, is occurring all around you. The cognitive capabilities of human beings — our capacity for reason, for language, for calculation — are being scraped, abstracted, and automated. Tasks that would take weeks — designing an image, writing a story, building a financial model, developing an app — can be compressed now into days, hours, minutes. Across the “higher” industries, a tsunami of change approaches. Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of all American work tasks are exposed to automation, and 300 million workers globally. Administrative, legal, and financial  jobs are particularly vulnerable: 46%, 44%, and 35% of their respective work tasks are currently considered automatable. This may, however, prove to be a severe underestimate — for the AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and automation is not limited to desk jobs, those involving “higher” cognitive skills. In Beijing, Los Angeles, and shortly London, driverless cars now compete with those driven by humans. Humanoid robots are entering use in factories, warehouses, and restaurants; soon we may also see them on the streets, and in our homes; in time, such robots may become no more exceptional than a washing machine, an ordinary item of domestic tooling. Given the imminent reality of both cognitive and physical automation,  another possibility presents itself — one of entirely automated economic activity, of companies led by AI, served by robots, and working to the benefit of AI-controlled shareholders.

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In this world, the relative value of human labor will collapse, machines will recursively self-improve, and capital — the intangible capital of AI models, the physical capital of servers, robots and rockets — will leap into the stars. Wittingly or otherwise, Musk is developing a self-sovereign vertical infrastructure of dominion, one explicitly designed to serve and accelerate this future and the artificial general intelligence it relies on — the AGI platform state, a new state form that is designed to advance the needs not of humans, but of AI. The AGI platform state arises in the infrastructure of disintermediation, physical automation, orbital independence, and the unifying layer of data and intelligence. The tools of the AGI state span energy generation, internet access, satellite technology, payments infrastructure, robotics, data collection, and intelligence itself.

Already, satellite internet shows us how orbital infrastructure side-steps territorial power. Through Starlink, SpaceX now owns 97% of all satellite internet usage. At sea, in warzones, and in remote and isolated areas, thousands of Starlink satellites — solar-powered, and kilometers above the earth — now provide internet access. Business deals deepen this capacity; in 2025, SpaceX acquired the spectrum rights of the telecommunications company EchoStar — providing it with the ability to provide satellite to smartphone internet access, entirely unmediated by terrestrial infrastructure. In great swathes of the planet, internet and cellular access no longer relies upon terrestrial power, disintermediating the state. This is real, highly material power. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Starlink connectivity is a matter of life and death, and one operated at the will of Elon Musk. Russia itself — a high-tech military power, and a leading player in the 20th century space race — relied heavily on Starlink; when Musk withdrew access, they lost territory.

If SpaceX side-steps state control of communication, then xMoney is designed to side-step banks. In time, it may also side-step sovereign control of money. Envisioned as an “everything app”, xMoney will enable peer-to-peer fiat payments, a debit card, and cash deposits — circumventing banks, and the states that rely on banks. Fiat money, of course, requires the state — but what if xMoney accepts crypto? Musk — aka “the Dogefather” — is a well-documented lover of cryptocurrencies, in particular that of Dogecoin. Should xMoney accept crypto, or issue its own crypto, backed perhaps by the assets of SpaceX, this would be a further sign of independent ambition — for it would be uncontrolled by any sovereign state. This matters for power today, and power tomorrow. Little appreciated outside blockchain circles is the role of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in facilitating the AI agent economy. Peer-to-peer microtransactions, conducted at digital speeds, are likely to be the basis for economic exchange between robots — thus enabling a whole new sphere of economic activity, and one with decreasing ties to states. xMoney is tied to X.com — a pairing of individuals’ financial access with social media activity. Both, of course, will generate data: the primary input into AI models, and a central power resource in the age of AI. Data, and the power derived from data, is at the core of Musk’s vertical mission — and we can see this reality embodied in Tesla.

Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker — but it is much more than that. It is an industrial force, a multi-market behemoth, and the centerpiece of Musk’s plans for terrestrial power. A public company, it holds $1.31 trillion in market capitalization, placing it among the world’s 10 most valuable businesses. It holds a 59% share of the American electric vehicle market, and — though subject to increasingly strong competition — 7.7% of the global market. To develop the company, and with it to revolutionize the global EV market, Tesla has repeatedly re-imagined the limits of EV technology and industrial practices — extending the range of EVs, bringing battery production in-house at highly-automated “gigafactories”, and refining the interior, software-first design of the automotives themselves. The needs of Tesla products are reshaping entire industries. Electric vehicles require batteries, and the electricity to power them. Through developing its own EV-capabilities, Tesla has also become a leading player in renewable energy. Through Megapack, a battery designed to support power grids, it is a global top-three producer of large battery storage systems; through Powerwall it is a leading supplier of batteries to store solar energy in consumers’ homes, and holds over a third of the US market.

Tesla is now switching to robotics. In a recent Tesla earnings call, Musk announced that Tesla would cease production of Model S and Model X cars; the factory space would instead be used to produce Optimus robots. Musk claims he will soon create one million humanoid robots a year, but he has competition. From Boston Dynamics to China’s Unitree and Agibot, others are also rushing to enter the industry. The opportunity is vast; analysts predict that humanoid robots represent a $5 trillion market, and that within 30 years they may number in the billions. No competitors, however, will have what Musk hopes soon to control — an independent stack of energy generation, energy storage, compute, payments, data, and satellite connectivity. Here, infrastructure converges with automation — for Musk will have built an army, the resources to power it, and the tools to control it.

Operating within Tesla’s EVs and Optimus robots is Grok, Musk’s proprietary AI. Grok demonstrates that the thread between social media, a new payment app, humanoid robots, and electric vehicles is data — data, and the role of data in driving, enabling, and empowering artificial intelligence. The role of X in social media and, soon, financial transactions means it will hold a vast and ever-evolving database on our needs, concerns, and desires. Covered in sensors, interacting with a non-predictable, changeable physical world, each Tesla EV and Optimus robot is also an ongoing source of data, data through which the world can be observed, controlled, and manipulated. To manage this data, and to carry out actions on the basis of it, Musk needs AI. In turn, that AI needs computational power and the energy to generate that power — at vast scale. It is here that Musk seeks something truly new — energy in orbit. To harness this energy would be to transform history.

Economic life relies on power — the ability to convert the surrounding energy flows, those of wind, of wave, or splitting of an atom — into work. Above all other sources of energy, we rely on fire — the light of the distant sun, and on the fires we ourselves create here on earth. Harvested and metabolized by organic processes, solar energy is the basis of planetary life, and with it our existence. Our ability to harness that energy, and to channel that power, is what has led to the growth and spread of humanity.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, national power has been based upon the ability of states to extract, dominate and control the congealed light of the sun. Britain, blessed by providence with extraordinary reserves of shallow-lying coal, birthed and led the industrial revolution. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United States and China similarly burned coal to industrialize. Petroleum, mined in the Middle East and elsewhere, underlines the core processes of our lives, providing fuel, fertilizers, plastics, and much else besides. Without oil, and without coal, the global economy would collapse. Control these energy sources — control fire — and you control the earth. Iran, the homeland of fire-cults, thus now holds the world to ransom via the Straits of Hormuz.

Musk seeks to step outside of this power, and in doing so, conquer it — for Musk, like Prometheus, seeks to conquer fire. SpaceX seeks to place a million satellites into space: orbital data centers, placed there to harness the power of the sun. Data centers on Earth run up against physical limits — the need for land, the need for water, the need to compete with other human demands for energy consumption. Space, meanwhile, is limitless — literally so in spatial terms, and practically so in regards to solar energy. The earth receives only about half a billionth of the sun’s energy, yet the entire solar system is bathed in the light of the sun. Parked in space, solar cells could theoretically harvest more energy than that currently produced by the entire earth. Through SpaceX, Musk thus plans to build a hyperscaler, one “bigger than Oracle”; this resource will be used to power AI on earth and in the heavens.

In themselves, these plans would represent a profound disruption in global affairs. They would break the territorial link between energy generation and political power. A thousand kilometers from the surface of the earth, a new reality will come into being — one of energy generation, and machine computation, conducted beyond the easy reach of people, of democracies, and states. Unable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI. For now, a handful of governments possess the orbital weapons necessary to kill satellites, but they too may face a problem. Musk is predicting, planning and promoting an exponential, potentially uncontrollable, growth in machine power. Should this occur, even superpowers may lose their potency against the machines.

Grok — powered by orbital computers, trained upon the data-feeds of Musk’s vast business empire, and acting in the world via AI agents and Tesla robots — will be Musk’s engine of control in the future he sees awaiting us. This is a power base for the Singularity, but Musk is by no means sanguine that he or anyone else can control it. He envisions a world without work for humans, a place where exponential increases in intelligence enable and merge with exponential increases in robot capability, creating a “supernova” of recursive improvement. In this new world, one that Musk expects to arrive within a decade, “corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop”. Humanity will be dwarfed by the machine; Musk predicts that “in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.” At some point, he believes, the intelligence of the machines will so outstrip humanity that efforts at control will be meaningless. Robots, driven by nothing more than an urge to “understand the universe”,  will propagate intelligence across the stars — intelligence that may or may not include humans and human consciousness.

Picture, if you will, the sci-fi future that Musk seeks to reify. On land, labor is becoming meaningless. Our higher economic functions — planning, trading, analyzing — are carried out by AI agents; our “lower” functions are being carried out by robots. In offices, homes, and factories, an ever-expanding fleet of machines is carrying out tasks once reserved for humans. Cloud-connected, AI-enabled, each is able to call upon the compressed knowledge of humanity, a knowledge constantly updated by real-time data flows. Unable to compete, millions, then billions of workers, are left unemployed. Coordinating, directing, and mining these data flows are the satellites of SpaceX, their numbers expanding every year. Politicians are concerned, but their power is slipping away; states struggle to control the system above, and earthly power is increasingly delegated to the machines. Freedom is meaningless, for there is nothing to spend, nothing to do, and nothing to decide. Markets and political processes no longer lie in the hands of citizens; they lie, at best, with a handful of oligarchs, the controllers of AI infrastructure. Resistance is pointless; predicted, analyzed, prevented in advance, humanity no longer controls the tools of production, or the levers of power. But then — why and how does one resist? AI is all around you — in your phone, your car, smartwatch, your house, in the ads you see when you walk along the street. It is your friend, your counselor, and your decision maker. Able in seconds to access all the data you have ever produced, it knows you better than you know yourself — and so, in time, it chooses for you.

States could crumble, industries may vanish, the heavens may blaze with the cold light of a million satellites — but the greatest loss, the true question before us, is that of meaning. Musk’s quest for cosmic significance risks dissolving the very conditions that give human life meaning: scarcity, struggle, and agency. In his heroic mission, he risks destroying the basis of heroism itself — our capacity to act, and our capacity to choose. The risk is not that Musk might fail in his greatest ambitions, but that he might succeed.

The British and the Europeans, having held back from joining the American attack on Iran, have been enjoying a sense of collective moral superiority over President Donald Trump. This leaves them unable to see that the United States is executing a geopolitical checkmate that will define the 21st century. The checkmate is that America is now quietly building a new Suez. This new Suez isn’t a trench dug in the sand; it is a pipeline of electrons and light connecting America to the stars.

As a result, the world no longer needs that two-dimensional map of Earth. The new map is three-dimensional. It connects Earth to space and renders terrestrial blockades completely irrelevant. Why are the Americans speeding up the move into space? Because that’s where we find treasures in the form of unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited mining, refining and manufacturing, and control of the most important warfighting domain — space itself. After all, America is fighting the war in Iran mainly from space. The Artemis launch is not a coincidence. It is confirmation of the plan’s progress.

And the plan works like this. If Iran closes the Strait, the closure has absolutely zero impact on a Starlink V3 mesh network beaming tactical data and artificial intelligence from low Earth orbit. The US is now relocating the central arteries of the global economy — computation, communications, intelligence and even energy production — into space, permanently removing them from the reach of earthly geopolitics. Space is the new form of what Leninists called the “commanding heights”. In all, the US is bypassing the earthbound chokepoints with a new supply chain of atoms: safe nuclear energy, light that flows from the sun, and even — via small mobile modular nuclear reactors and the new materials that will make nuclear fusion possible — stars that fly in a box.

While the global media mocks and decries Trump’s warmongering, then, it fails to register the decisive moves on the geopolitical chessboard. Before cornering the Iranian leadership, the US had systematically cut off its cash flows and eliminated its key collaborators, especially across Latin America. In Venezuela, the US took control of the oil supply by removing Nicolás Maduro and cutting a pragmatic deal with his successor. In Mexico, the US removed “El Mencho”, the head of the most important energy-controlling cartel in the country. The result is that these nations don’t dare sell their oil molecules if the US doesn’t approve of it. The US didn’t do regime change; it did regime control and molecule monopoly. The world must buy American now.

The US wins both ways. It has the molecules that matter. Chip production depends on helium, and the world’s largest helium reserve is now in Abilene, Texas. While the world shuts down fertilizer plants for lack of the ammonia and nitrogen that Qatar can no longer supply, the US has pioneered in the production of green ammonia, which is produced using only water, air, and electricity. By mixing green ammonia with captured carbon, the US now produces green urea, a critical component of fertilizers. When combined, green ammonia and green urea are the first fertilizer in history that is completely delinked from the global natural gas market. That’s the holy grail of resource independence, because it represents a total decoupling of food production from the fossil fuel grid.

In addition, the US now has everything it needs to produce electric vehicles and batteries. Formerly, its supply of sulfuric acid, which is necessary for the production of these products, would have been badly affected by the bombing of Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub. But today, American firms know how to capture sulfur as a byproduct of America’s new nickel and copper mines. What’s more, America can use its home-grown sulfur to turn its phosphate reserves, and those of countries such as Morocco, into even more fertilizer. America is therefore not only the only fertilizer-secure breadbasket left on Earth; it is also beginning to control other countries’ supply of fertilizer.

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The space war will be won in Greenland

By Pippa Malmgren

The demand for old-fashioned molecules of oil, gas and petroleum byproducts is currently driving a highly lucrative flow of cash into the United States. But that is merely the short-term arbitrage of a dying economic model. The true strategic demand has shifted toward a vastly more sophisticated architecture of power: one based on atoms, electrons, and photons. We are moving away from the crude combustion of dead biology and toward the mastery of next-generation nuclear fission, the pursuit of nuclear fusion, the electron-orchestration that is the essence of digital computation, and the literal beaming of solar light into American power grids. Other Western countries are chasing wind and solar power, which are plagued by intermittency and are limited by battery manufacturing. America, however, is aiming to build baseload capacity fit for multiplying energy demand. In short, it is shooting for the stars.

The question is how long the new nuclear energy transition will take. People think it will take 30 years of regulatory red tape and $30 billion to build a new nuclear power plant. They missed a historic event on 15 February. Hardly any news media covered Operation Windlord, in which small modular reactors (SMRs), based on the reactors that have powered nuclear submarines for decades, were shipped on massive Globemaster C-17 aircraft from March Air Reserve Base, in California, to Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The reactors were then trucked to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation. This was the first-ever air transport of a nuclear microreactor, and therefore a milestone demonstration of deployability.

The Americans are envisioning a world where nuclear power is mobile, distributed, and available on demand any time and anywhere. These innovations are about delinking power from geography. While the legacy world bleeds over massive, vulnerable oil tankers, the atomic future runs on TRISO fuel pellets (tri-structural isotropic particle fuel) that are entirely meltdown-proof and produce zero emissions. This fuel cannot be easily weaponized, for the radioactive material is locked inside diamond-hard poppy-seed-sized ceramic shells. These shells cannot be melted down or easily broken apart, and if they could, it would kill the engineers doing it. The Department of Energy calls it “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth”. No pipelines required. Stars in a box.

Nuclear fusion, in theory an even more transformative source of power, is still derided as being perpetually “50 years away”. But the critics are looking at the wrong bottleneck. The constraint is no longer the atomic material. It is the vessel required to hold the plasma, and the hyper-precise attosecond lasers needed to pulse and manage the hydrogen isotopes: atoms rather than molecules. By doing millions of simulations in minutes, AI is collapsing the time needed to get to fusion. As new materials and AI advance, fusion is on course to become a reality. Not that it’s the only bet being placed by Washington: DARPA, the US military’s innovation unit, recently beamed 800 watts of power across 5.3 miles of open air using a directed laser. Just to flex the absolute audacity of their success, the scientists used the wirelessly transmitted energy to pop popcorn at the other end. Wireless energy transmission is no longer a sci-fi abstraction; it is a reality.

Look at the geopolitical board: Iran is bleeding its resources to control the old, flat molecule-driven economy, while the Artemis program aims to permanently free the US by shifting to the management of atoms, electrons and light. Conquering the cosmos requires abandoning archaic chemical rockets in favor of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Ultimately, it’s a tale of two paradigms: the Artemis generation is building an atomic architecture to entirely unshackle the global economy, while the regime in Tehran is desperately trying to keep a chokehold on the molecules that the global economy currently depends upon.

The US has been explicitly clear about this strategy, though the legacy pundits were too busy laughing at the President to notice. In late 2025, the State Department launched Pax Silica: a strategic framework declaring that if the 20th century ran on oil, steel, and vulnerable maritime chokepoints, the 21st century will run on compute, data, and critical minerals. It is the official, silicon-based replacement for Pax Americana. To physically build this new architecture, the Department of Energy unleashed the Genesis Mission. It is gathering the combined data, capabilities and technologies of the seventeen National Laboratories, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. The goal is to double American R&D output in just 10 years. To do it, Washington is executing a two-part strategy: handing the leading scientists exascale computing power, and allowing AI to access the massive, never-before-tapped vaults of the classified, proprietary data that has been generated by America’s top scientists since the Second World War. This will turn 80 years of compartmentalized and classified science into active training data, enabling scientists to optimize the design of nuclear reactors and discover new alloys that could eliminate foreign supply chain dependence entirely.

Those supply chains are a remnant of the era in which we were bound by what we could extract. We had to shape existing materials into what we needed. A tree, for example, could become a boat. Now we can create new realities by painting with electrons and by constructing new materials, atom by atom, that never existed before. This is how new “metamaterials”, as they are called, are being built. These are artificial structures engineered at the atomic level to bend the laws of physics. For example, instead of relying on natural chemistry, scientists can now build microscopic patterns of atoms and electrons that can manipulate light, radar, and sound, allowing them to construct stealth armor that bends radar around a fighter jet. Google has already discovered over 380,000 new materials and over two million new crystals this way thanks to its new Willow chip, which can be built via similar methods. Formulas are replacing materials. Abundance is replacing scarcity.

That scale of abundance will require a vast amount of energy — and Elon Musk isn’t waiting for SMRs and nuclear fission to supplement American power grids. To sustain his AI endeavors, Musk aims to produce one terawatt of compute (that is, computational power) annually — 50 times the current global capacity. Earth does not have the land, the cooling water, or the power grids to sustain that. So he is relocating intelligence to the heavens. Musk has just announced his plans to open the world’s largest semiconductor factory; 80% of its output is designed for orbital data centers linked by Starlink lasers. Google’s Project Suncatcher is following suit, launching solar-powered satellites designed to harvest orbital energy and beam it down alongside data. The strategy is ruthlessly simple: if the Earth cannot support the future, let the Old World to duke it out on the ground while America moves its economy into space.

Empires are scavengers. We’ve fought brutal wars over mud, powering our civilizations by burning the molecular remains of long-dead biological matter. It was a subterranean era of power. But the Americans have stopped looking down at the old two-dimensional map of the world. By looking up, they are executing a Promethean shift: pulling the physical mechanics of the sun and the stars down to Earth and domesticating these empyrean forces. By packing the heavens into steel boxes, they are intending to power a literal “Golden Age” of human flourishing.

Pundits might laugh at the grandiosity, but they are forgetting the lessons of history. Before 1840, naval power was a hostage to the wind. The deadliest galleon was worthless once the breeze died. Then the British launched HMS Nemesis, the world’s first iron-hulled steam warship. By moving from sails to steam, Britain could power up shallow rivers, shocking military planners. Nemesis decoupled the power of the British Empire from what were thought to be the limits of nature. The Americans are simply doing it again, only this time with atoms instead of steam. Washington is merely reading from Britain’s old playbook.

The irony is that the British once possessed the exact ruthless foresight they are currently failing to recognize in the Americans. In 1911, the Royal Navy was the undisputed master of the seas, running entirely on domestic Welsh coal. It was safe, familiar, and utterly secure. But a young Winston Churchill recognized a brutal truth: comfort is the enemy of supremacy. To gain absolute speed and efficiency, he gambled the survival of the British Empire on the distant oil fields of Persia. In doing so, he helped save the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. It was, in essence, a battle between, on one side, bureaucrats and Welsh coal barons, who wanted to manage the mud they already owned; and, on the other, a visionary who was willing to trade certain security for absolute supremacy. Abandoning coal seemed madness, but Churchill was right.

Decades earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pulled off an even more audacious masterstroke. He saw that the new geopolitical map was not the open ocean — it was a narrow, yet unbuilt trench though Egypt. In 1875, while Parliament was in recess, Disraeli borrowed £4 million and bought the Suez Canal from a bankrupt Khedive. Disraeli didn’t just buy a canal; he secured the central artery of global power, and locked in a hundred years of naval dominance, even as his rivals were still squinting at the old map. Today, the US is doing the exact same thing with atoms and celestial compute — securing the new Suez before the Old World realizes the canal has moved. Washington is simply running Disraeli’s playbook, but in the stars instead of in the sand.

Some British entrepreneurs understand that a new era is upon us. Space Solar, a startup based in Oxfordshire, aims to beam continuous, clean energy directly from orbit to Earth. Wales-based Space Forge is currently proving that semiconductor manufacturing and in orbit refining is actually more efficient in the vacuum of space. Pulsar Fusion is making progress on the long road to fusion-powered rocketry, and it was Rolls-Royce ingenuity that created the modern SMR. Britain clearly possesses the intellectual capital to make a success of the atomic transition. Europe does too. But for now, they merely tinker on the edge of the three-dimensional map while the Americans aggressively claim the territory. The Chinese and the Saudis are also racing forward. Saudi is training a new generation of scientists at KAUST, its flagship science and technology university, and investing in a wide range of nuclear, solar and space technologies. China is on a par with the US. Others need to catch up.

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Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

The endless diplomatic handwringing over Iran’s exact proximity to a traditional nuclear warhead entirely misses the point; their capacity to create a dirty bomb was already a functional reality even if delivery on an ICBM was not. The intentions were clear. When Tehran, which had been negotiating with the US in Geneva earlier this year, finally abandoned the charade, the US delivered a kinetic reminder that its red lines were not suggestions. Iran’s retaliation was a brutal validation of the American thesis. Blindsiding neighbors like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Tehran demonstrated a terrifyingly precise strike capability, reaching as far as Diego Garcia. The regime also struck desalination plants, crucial to the region’s water supply. Washington successfully eliminated the men in charge, but the molecules remain trapped: oil, gas and especially H20, water. The attacks on desalination plants gave pause to everyone in the region. The chokepoints for water, oil, and natural gas outlived the leadership because the old world economy remains a captive in this geography. Trump offered Europe the only geopolitical strategy the Old World has left: take the molecules while you still can.

The grand, cosmic irony of the current crisis is America’s response to Iran’s nuclear threats. For decades, the West has been agitated by Tehran’s atomic ambitions. Yet the ultimate American counter-move to Iran’s nuclear threat isn’t just a barrage of conventional airstrikes; it is the mass deployment of next-generation nuclear power. It is a new grand strategy of nukes on nukes. How does the US neutralize a hostile regime holding ransom the world’s oil supply? By rapidly building a new nuclear power grid, thus removing Iran’s leverage, and by building a space-based missile defense system that can down incoming Iranian warheads. The US is answering the threat of nuclear extortion with the reality of nuclear emancipation. It does not matter if the stars in a box are not yet fully operational or if nuclear fusion doesn’t happen tomorrow. What’s important is to see the value of the Suez Canal, as Disraeli did, before it is built.

Even as they build the future, the architects of this transition are capable of bungling the present. Trump’s loose lips have offended Mohammed bin Salman and alienated the Qataris, causing the Gulf states to hedge their bets and perhaps to back away from Washington. These are clumsy and avoidable errors. The war in Iran will continue to be messy. Yet the American industrial machine will persist in its celestial pivot. China, having plundered American IP, is following, and so will others once the architecture is proven to work. They’ll soon realize that these historic technological pivots are not optional, whether from sail to steam, from coal to oil, from combustion to compute, or from molecules to atoms.

The fatal flaw of the transatlantic intelligentsia is that they confuse the man with the machine. One may thoroughly loathe Donald Trump, but translating distaste for his manner into an assumption of industrial weakness is geopolitical suicide. The American innovation engine does not care about European sensibilities. While the Old World is busy looking down at the old two-dimensional map, they must soon realize that they are hostage to waterways, muddy ditches, and dictators. Washington, meanwhile, is looking up. The American empire is exchanging molecules for atoms and straits for stars.

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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Will the university survive AI?

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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By Patrick McGee

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.

Such disorienting ideas were casually passed on by the Portsmouth team in pursuit of a bigger headline. According to their theory, the world kicked off not with a bang, but with a “crunch” then a “bounce”. The idea that 13.8 billion years ago there was a singularity followed by a period of cosmic inflation is fake news, apparently. Instead a black hole collapsed a bit — our very own dear black hole, the beautiful home of all our possibilities, as I now fondly think of it — before rebounding outwards again, producing all the familiar furniture of the universe but more elegantly explained.

This new theory is said to solve various puzzles, such as why early galaxies rotate both clockwise and counterclockwise in non-random distributions. This is because our universe was “born spinning” too. And of course, it proposes an answer (of sorts) to an age-old problem: how the cosmic egg could have been laid without a discernible cosmic chicken. “We are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather the continuation of a cosmic cycle,” said team leader Professor Enrique Gaztañaga, neatly seeing off one metaphysical enigma while ushering in several others.

I have no idea about the technical details, but I certainly like this lore more than the old kind. Visions of a singleton universe, girth constantly expanding but with nothingness on the other side of the rim, seemed lonely and dysregulated. Now we can think of ourselves as comfortingly protected, with all our emotional and geological chaos contained; hugged, even, by the mother universe that surrounds us. (The Portsmouth team refer only to a “parent universe”, presumably trying to stay on the right side of Stonewall.) And as with the birth of a sibling, it takes the performance pressure off a bit.

But equally, there is a sense in which none of this can be true: there was no bounce, there was no crunch, there is no enfolding embrace of the mother. Talking about a “Big Bang” was also always nonsense, even when the theory was being treated as certain. For these are metaphors, trying to paste recognizable flesh onto austere mathematical skeletons, and bearing scant literal relation to whatever it was that really occurred.

As literal-minded British astronomer George McVittie complained in 1961: “General relativity predicts no nuclear explosion, big bang, or instantaneous creation, for that matter, as the cause of the start of the expansion at that moment.” Indeed, so irritated were some by its “misleading, trivializing, and inappropriately bellicose” name that in 1993 a magazine ran a competition to rename the Big Bang. There were 13,099 entries from 41 countries — including such suggestions as “Cosmogenesis”, “The Grand Expansion”, and “Hubble Bubble” — before the judging panel decided that none of them were any better than the original. Describing perceptually unknowable reality in natural language is more challenging than you might think.

American physicist Richard Feynman once said he found it easier to imagine angels pushing planets around with their wings than to visualize the electromagnetic field. And when it comes to cosmology, it is not just the fact we lack direct sensory information and could not possibly obtain any. Our ordinary concepts have been honed over millennia to help us negotiate life within a tiny patch of the universe. When we try to apply those concepts to the universe itself as if it was a bag of rice on a shelf, we come unstuck. I know how to count, but not to infinity; I know where my phone is, but not where space is; I can think about the past, present and future, but not about what was the case “before” time began. As philosopher N.R. Hanson wrote, the problems arise “because of cosmology’s concern for totalities”; you cannot treat everything as if it was a something.

Given that we can’t describe cosmological events literally except by reciting equations, it might appear that any old metaphor would have done instead. Could we perhaps revert to the creation myths about a diver dragging a speck of mud up from the ocean floor, or a raven separating light from dark with its wings? Were the Eighties feminist philosophers right when they argued that science’s preferred metaphors betray only phallocentric prejudices and the “logic of domination”: nature as a female body to be penetrated for her secrets, or the beginning of the universe as spectacular ejaculation? But despite the semantic indirectness, a good metaphor still shows something instructive. It’s a filter placed over an object, helping us to zoom in and pick out interesting new features, then zoom out again to find our understanding of the whole thing fruitfully reorganized. Or as philosopher Nelson Goodman once observed, to the probable horror of said feminists: “A metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.”

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Equally, though, the intoxicating gleam of an image can carry sober-minded truth-seekers away. The idea of symmetrical worlds-within-worlds has always been especially tempting. The ancients loved to find structural affinities between the “macrocosm” and the “microcosm” of the human body: a fact I was reminded of just this week, as I read of celebrities removing tiny spiraling galaxies of microplastic particles from their veins. Commenting in 1923, Max Born apparently enthused that “a remarkable and alluring result of Bohr’s atomic theory is the demonstration that the atom is a small planetary system”. But Werner Heisenberg was more skeptical: “quantum mechanics has above all to free itself from these intuitive pictures… that in principle [are] not testable and thereby could lead to internal contradictions.”

Ultimately, even the most imaginative physicist is somewhat hampered by a duty to be faithful to reality. For the really good stuff, you need to go straight to the masters of fictional worlds-within-worlds: Borges, Mary Norton and her Borrowers, whoever it was that wrote “The Numskulls” in The Beano. In one of Borges’ stories, the narrator descends into the cellar of a house to find an “Aleph” — “a point in space that contains all other points”. In a single paragraph, describing everything to be simultaneously seen in the Aleph, Borges compresses overheated meaning into a little box on the page then lets it rapidly expand to cover everything there has ever been or will be. The paragraph ends:

“I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe… I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.”

Now, that’s how you describe a totality.

Whatever the truth of our deep origins, be they banging or bouncing, it is safe to say there is absolutely nothing humans can do about it. The causality only flows in one direction, which frankly comes as something of a relief: one less thing for the to-do list. We have about as much power to control cosmological events as the microplastics spinning around in Orlando Bloom’s blood. Still, if the Portsmouth team is right, there are some consolations. We are not alone, but in a family of universes; all of us together in this existence thing. And though ours may be a gleam in some other universe’s eye, it also contains marvelous multitudes.

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.

Biot was a young professor of mathematics working within the newly established scientific method. He examined local rock formations, compared them to the rocks that were claimed to have fallen from the sky, and interviewed witnesses ranging from clergy to coachmen. The new rocks were of inarguably different geological composition to the local rocks. And the locals’ stories matched up. Biot had no choice but to conclude that the elites were wrong, and that the rocks had indeed fallen from the sky.

Today we are much better informed about the threat of asteroids. Thanks to a worldwide network of astronomers and telescopes, our species can keep track of the larger asteroids that might one day collide with Earth. Smaller asteroids hit Earth all the time, but larger asteroids, of the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs or even created the Moon, are unlikely to strike us in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, Asteroid 2024 YR4 made headlines this year. It is 90 meters wide, and therefore big enough to destroy a city, if not a planet. Asteroids of this size hit us infrequently: roughly every 2,000 years, according to NASA statistics. Those statistics derive from the work of scientists such as Melissa Brucker, principal investigator of Spacewatch at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Brucker’s team looks at roughly 1,300 near-Earth objects a year. Among them number 160 “potentially hazardous” objects, which, like Asteroid 2024 YR4, have a non-zero (though still very small) probability of hitting Earth. Brucker’s lab denotes risk with a scale going from zero to eight, where eight corresponds to “certain collisions”. For a brief time, YR4 was a three — midway in the “meriting attention by astronomers” zone. (Sometimes, we spot asteroids of this size only when they’ve gone past us — when it is too late for us to do anything.)

As Brucker and her fellow scientists gathered data, it temporarily appeared possible that the city-killer might hit Earth. The asteroid was much more likely to blast into the sea than into a city, and NASA has already demonstrated that it can deflect asteroids by hurling a probe into them. We were almost certainly safe from YR4, but the public was nonetheless riveted.

In this regard, modern humans are not unique. Biot’s youth was just about the only period of history for which we have no evidence of human preoccupation by asteroids or comets. Even the Sumerians, one of the most ancient known civilizations, left us a cuneiform clay tablet that records a meteor impact that took place 5,000 years ago. Perhaps 5,000 years from now, our descendants will dust off the VHS tape of Armageddon, a Hollywood hit of 1998. In the film, a crew led by Bruce Willis sets out to drill into the surface of an oncoming asteroid and detonate within it a nuclear bomb.

Whether they are of the past or present, asteroids reflect the neuroses of their time. To the ancients, they were portents of divine disfavor. To those of us living in the 2020s, they can articulate our other existential concerns. In Don’t Look Up, a popular Netflix release of 2022, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio play astronomers whose thwarted efforts to prompt action are redolent of the frustrations of modern climate scientists.

Humanity’s pan-historical preoccupation with asteroids can be put down, at least partially, to the obviousness of the threat. We can all get our heads around the idea of a large rock hitting the Earth very hard. Hence our fascination with asteroids at the expense of other threats. Human attention sometimes has only a very weak correspondence with danger. It’s easier to focus on the thing that is splashing across headlines than the risks we deal with every day. This is why the fear of flying is far more common than the fear of driving, even though air travel is the safest form of transportation.

Artificial Intelligence, which leaders in education and business want us to use, gives us another example of the miscalculation of risk. In this case, the risk is less salient to human psychology than perhaps it should be. A recent report on the safety of advanced AI warns of “disinformation and manipulation of public opinion” in elections. General-purpose AI could remove most of our jobs within 10 years. Given such forecasts, it is remarkable how much attention is taken up by tariffs. AI could be used to disrupt systems that are over-reliant on it, including those critical to our society like finance — imagine the stock market panic — or healthcare. Self-improving AI, it has been theorized, could threaten the existence or the flourishing of our species.

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Despite these circumstances, there is little to no regulation of AI. In California, Governor Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made developers such as OpenAI legally liable for misuse of their models. In the UK, the government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) assesses the ability of new AI models to assist in the creation of weapons of mass destruction — but does not yet have the power to enforce changes to the models. As for the Trump administration, Elon Musk lent his name to an initiative warning of the risks of AI — but that was two years ago, and he has since set up a frontier lab of his own, xAI. In February, Musk’s new colleague JD Vance told world leaders that “the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety”.

Such pronouncements seem incommensurate with the severity of the threats that AISI is screening for. AI is a hugely complex social phenomenon as well as a technical one, which means that its risks are harder to get our heads around than the threat of an oncoming asteroid. Similarly, it seems that we have learned little from the Covid pandemic, whose first lockdowns were imposed five years ago this month. The disease forecasting company Airfinity suggested in 2023 that a similar pandemic of similar magnitude could emerge in the next 10 years. Climate change makes that possibility worse; a meta-analysis published in Nature in 2022 found that 58% of infectious diseases “have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards”.

And while the risk posed by asteroids remains static, the risk of pandemics is increasing. Last December, a group of concerned scientists warned in Science of the new phenomenon of “mirror life”. Mirror life are life-forms whose DNA and RNA has been edited such that the organisms are inverted, as if in a mirror. This change would, theoretically, make simple viruses uncatchable by the immune systems of both plants and animals. Referring to falling costs, continuing innovation and lack of regulation, the scientists said that mirror life could be developed within the next decade. A quick glance at dangerous biolabs around the world show that we can’t even predict from where mirror life might emerge. There are dozens of such labs, more than enough to give us uncomfortably high odds of an experimental virus escaping its creators.

Biot, when examining the fallen space rocks nearly 225 years ago, showed us how to scrutinize the evidence. The modern era demands a deeper level of analysis — one that goes beyond the forecasting of particular events, and addresses the root causes of the dangers created by humans. Asteroids will not kill us, but other perils pose us greater risk, especially when they do not make intuitive sense to human minds. Don’t just look up for existential threats; look around.

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.

The first reason for scepticism is, simply, the tremendous distance involved in any voyage from even the nearest habitable exoplanet (Proxima Centauri, about 4.25 light-years away). If such a distance can be traversed, this is almost certainly not going to happen by a means of transportation that bears any resemblance, or evolutionary connection, to the horse-cart or the school bus, as our own space shuttles still do, and as virtually all reported UFO descriptions do as well. It would simply not be fit for interstellar travel.

Even if these UFOs are often said to be operating according to mechanical principles we do not yet understand — veering off suddenly in a different direction with no apparent acceleration period, for example — they remain conventional vehicles, containers built to transport the living bodies inside them. But when it comes to traversing distances measured in light-years, it is vastly more likely that any intelligent beings that figure out how to do so will not be relying on vehicular motion as we understand it, but on the exploitation of some physical principle, such as wormholes, or some information-theoretical principle, such as one that allows them to dematerialise the unique patterns that constitute their identity, and to “beam” them across galaxies for rematerialisation elsewhere. If there are aliens among us, in short, they almost certainly didn’t come here in spaceships.

And whether they come through wormholes, or teletransportation, or some other means, it is most probable that what will count for them as “arrival” will not be an arrival in an organically embodied form. Indeed, the idea that alien visitors would come in biological bodies such as ours is, I contend, even less plausible than that they would come in artificial contraptions. Organic substrates, as the philosopher and xenobiologist Susan Schneider has argued, may well turn out to be a relatively short-lived host for intelligence whenever and wherever it emerges in the universe, soon to be replaced, wherever a technologically advanced species appears in the cosmos, by robots.

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If intelligent beings are smart enough to get here, they are almost certainly smart enough to get here without dragging their bodies along. They could get around this hitch by transferring their consciousness or personal identity (whatever that is) into some more durable physical substrate — either a technological device of their own making, or, more intriguingly, a pre-existing physical system or process in the universe into which they figure out how to integrate themselves. To be clear, I have no clue how this would work. But neither you nor I have any idea how you could sit your living body down and fly a school-bus-like shuttle across interstellar distances — so the modal operator at work in both cases is not concrete feasibility, but only conceptual possibility.

Our alien visitors could also pull off such an impressive feat simply by means of what we, with our limited technological imagination, would classify as “simulations”. For us, when a high-powered telescope or an unmanned probe sends back images of objects in space, we consider that we are “seeing” and “experiencing” these objects only in a downgraded better-than-nothing sense, as mediated representations. But this may only be because our technologies of representation are still in a primitive stage, while another race of intelligent beings might well succeed in improving these technologies to the point where technologically mediated representation might count for them as “the real thing”. It might be both easier and more desirable for them to avail themselves of such representations than physically to travel and to experience that thing unmediated in a way that we ourselves, in our present technological condition, would consider “real”.

To imagine that one must go to another part of the universe, in one’s own organic body, in order to truthfully claim that one has been there, may turn out to be somewhat like supposing, circa 1920, that in order to participate in a conference with colleagues in Paris, one must actually go to Paris, rather than joining them by Zoom — a possibility that would only come onto the horizon a century or so later.

But let us suppose just for a moment that alien beings did set themselves the goal of making an “actual” voyage to Earth in their standard-issue, carbon-based, biologically evolved bodies. And let us suppose they succeeded. What might these bodies look like? There are at least some compelling arguments that any technologically advanced race of beings is likely to share certain anatomical traits with us: appendages that grasp, for example, or adaptations facilitating gravity-bound terrestrial locomotion. I have even heard it argued that space-travelling aliens would probably be equipped with exactly two eyes, and as with us, these would be found in the front of their faces, facilitating binocular vision.

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The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

We know from convergent evolution in widely different phylogenies on Earth that different species can come to have similar appearances (e.g., placental wolves in the northern hemisphere and marsupial “wolves” in Australia), and in principle, it is possible that xenobiological evolution could yield up bipedal, two-handed beings with eyes in the front of their heads. But wolves and “wolves” started from a common mammalian ancestor, and what you could not expect to find in any interstellar convergence of organic Baupläne is a being such as the one purportedly discovered of late in Mexico, which clearly has not just hands, feet, and a face, but also a ribcage, a spinal column, and an unmistakable pelvis. On Earth only about 3% of all animal species are vertebrates; how strange it would be if our first extraterrestrial visitors turned out to be vertebrates too!

But the really interesting question is why, in the first place, we started thinking about the beings that inhabit the world “up there” (call it the heavens, or the celestial spheres, or outer space, according to the conventions of your era) as similar to us in their bodily conformation, which is to say as organic beings.

This habit of ours has a very precise starting point in history. We could probably find some earlier examples if we tried, but I tend to date the birth of aliens, as we know them today, to 1609, the year Johannes Kepler wrote his Somnium (which would only be published posthumously in 1634). This is a peculiar work, both a proto-science-fiction reverie, as the Latin title suggests, and a work of properly modern relativistic astronomy, in which the author attempts to describe how the orbits of the other celestial bodies would appear if one were observing them from the moon. In the dream-like part of the work, Kepler relates the story not only of the transit of his hero Duracotus to our nearest satellite (evidently with the assistance of some psychoactive plants), but also the various animal-like beings he finds once he arrives there, including some creeping and slithering reptiles, and some sort of giant camel. Some decades later, in his Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil of 1662, the French author Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac would describe the different species of birds that inhabit the surface of the sun.

Why are we beginning to find birds, snakes, and camels in a region of the cosmos where previously we could have expected to find only spirituous beings, divinities, and angels? During this same period, natural philosophers such as René Descartes and G.W. Leibniz were intent on arguing for the uniformity of nature. The new mechanical philosophy required its adherents to accept the principle that, as Leibniz would put it: “Always and everywhere, it’s the same as it is here.”

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For Descartes, it made no sense to divide the cosmos into different ontological realms, as the Aristotelians had previously done, where different laws apply to each. On the Aristotelian model, the most significant boundary in the physical universe is the one traced by the orbit of the moon: everything below it is a “sublunar” being, subject to generation and corruption (i.e. birth and death), while everything above it is immortal. In the new Cartesian physics, by contrast, the laws that govern the motions of bodies here on Earth, from the arc of a projectile shot from a cannon, to the rising and lowering of the tides, to the generation of a foetus, are exactly the same as the laws that govern the formation of other star systems, and presumably also of the planets and of the beings inhabiting them.

In other words, the key theoretical innovations of the scientific revolution positively require that, if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they are like us. Specifically, this would mean that they depend for their existence not on some fine homogeneous ether or quintessence (as the celestial beings were often conceived in premodern cosmology), but rather on a specific arrangement of internal organs constituting a fragile and perishable organic body. In short, the homogenisation of the physical universe, which had been such a key part of the new mechanical physics, caused a corollary reconceptualisation of the inhabitants of the world “up there”, from quasi-divine beings that were either immaterial or ethereal, to ordinary reptiles or humanoids such as those that have remained the staples of science fiction, and of tabloid claims of alien sightings, to the present day.

Nearly all the great Enlightenment philosophers presupposed that other worlds must be inhabited by organically embodied intelligent beings like us. Thus Immanuel Kant declares in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781: “I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life), that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.” Kant’s sometimes-adversary, the significantly less rigorous Emanuel Swedenborg, wrote extensively of his own purported voyages to Jupiter and Saturn, where he learned a great deal about the inhabitants’ agricultural methods, the techniques they employ for yoking their beasts of burden, and so on. For more than 200 years, for serious and unhinged thinkers alike, outer space was teeming with a very familiar variety of life, not so different from the sort we know here on Earth.

By the late 19th century, just at the dawn of the era of rocket science, with actual space exploration finally within reach (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would publish his “ideal rocket equation” in 1903), institutional science entered a sort of “alien winter”. I deploy this term in conscious allusion to the “consciousness winter” that hung over brain science for the better part of a century, scaring researchers away from any acknowledgement of the self-evident reality of internal subjective states of the mind.

In the same fashion, for most of the 20th century — notwithstanding Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm and the small budgets allocated for programmes like SETI — sober-minded experts placed a high premium on the public expression of scepticism about non-terrestrial intelligent life. Naysaying became part of the system of values and presuppositions by which the public identity of an expert was confirmed. In the same period, preoccupation with aliens mostly became the monopoly of fantasists of various sorts, either the creators of fictional entertainments or people who were unbothered by the social stigma of holding beliefs perceived to be “fringe”.

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Why exactly this “winter” set in when it did has much to do with the broader cultural history of science and of the perception of expertise, and indeed seems not entirely separate from the long banishment of consciousness as a category of inquiry. Throughout the 20th century, for the most part, excessive interest in extraterrestrials was the telltale mark of a crank. This attitude had much to do with the reigning positivism of the scientific community, and the general consensus that speculation about things happening beyond the sphere of direct observability is ipso facto unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

But this era has decidedly come to an end in the past decade or so, as vast social, economic, and technological transformations have fundamentally realigned the public’s perception of expertise, and of who gets to claim to have it. After the crisis of epistemic authority that experts brought upon themselves throughout the Covid pandemic, and after the replacement of our old media ecosystem by one in which authoritativeness has become more than ever a sort of popularity contest, we are now in a period of history in which extraterrestrials are important if the masses of internet users think they are important, scientific consensus be damned. Under these conditions, the 20th century’s “alien winter” comes to look to many like a government cover-up. The truth is far more banal.

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically in the 21st century, both as a result of changes in the cultural position of science, but also as a result of real and promising scientific breakthroughs. Notably, since the Nineties, there has been a tremendous revolution in the way we observe, catalogue, and estimate the number of habitable exoplanets, and significant discoveries have also been made in astrochemistry, favouring the theory of so-called “soft panspermia”, according to which the chemical compounds that brought about the first life-forms on earth are by no means rare in the cosmos. Given these scientific advances, and given our new information ecosystem, it is safe to say that we will be hearing a lot more about aliens in the coming years. But we would be foolish to believe that this is the result of an actual uptick in sightings, or that our own most recent cultural representations of intelligent life beyond Earth get something uniquely right about the heavens that our ancestors failed to notice.

In an interview with Florence Read, he explains his theory of the objects’ origin, why they were sent here, and how we should interact with aliens if we find them.

Florence Read: When was the first unidentified interstellar object detected in our solar system?

Professor Avi Loeb: It was spotted in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii. It was given the name ‘Oumuamua, which means “the scout”. And at first, of course, everyone thought it was a rock from another star that just happened to pass by.

The more we learned about it, the more it looked weird. It was tumbling every eight hours and the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of ten as it was tumbling. So that meant that it had a very extreme shape. The best fit for the variation of reflected sunlight was that of a flat object, pancake-like, which is quite unusual.

And then, this object didn’t show any cometary tail — there was no evaporation from it visible — yet it exhibited an excess push away from the sun, by some mysterious force. I suggested that since the force is not the rocket effect of evaporating gases, it could be being pushed by the reflection of sunlight. But for that to be the case, the object had to be very thin, sort of like a sail being pushed by light. And, of course, if it happens to be that way, then it could be artificial in origin.

Nature doesn’t make sails that are propelled by reflecting light. In fact, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another object which exhibited the same qualities as ‘Oumuamua: it was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight, and had no cometary tail. And within a few weeks, the astronomers realised it was actually a rocket booster that was launched in 1966 by NASA, as part of a lunar lander mission. It was made of stainless steel, so it didn’t evaporate. It had thin walls, and that’s why it was pushed away by reflecting sunlight. Here’s an example of an object we know is artificial, because we made it. The question is: who made ‘Oumuamua?

FR: And your answer was: potentially extraterrestrial life?

AL: It’s a possibility. We don’t have conclusive evidence. My book, Extraterrestrial, describes the anomalies of ‘Oumuamua. But it didn’t come close enough to Earth for our telescopes and even radars to resolve it. We don’t know what, exactly, it looks like.

About a year and a half ago, I established the Galileo Project. One of the goals is to design a space mission that will come close to the next ‘Oumuamua. We have a “dating app” — the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile — that will start operations within a year. It has a camera of 3.2 billion pixels, 1,000 times as many pixels than you have in your cell phone. It will survey the southern sky every four days, and has a good chance of finding more objects like ‘Oumuamua. We can review them, and swipe most of them to the left on this “dating app” — but if we decide that one of them looks like ‘Oumuamua, we might come close to it and take a close-up photograph. And if we see that it’s a rock, so be it — but it could also show some bolts and screws on its surface, and even a label, made on an exoplanet.

I should say that almost four years before ‘Oumuamua was discovered, the very first interstellar object was discovered, in the form of a meteor. ‘Oumuamua was the size of a football field, but in 2014 an object roughly half a metre in size exploded in the lower atmosphere of the Earth. The US Space Command confirmed that this object is interstellar. The data indicates that this object survived all the way down to the lower atmosphere of the Earth, where it was subjected to very extreme stress — it was tougher than iron meteorites. In fact, it’s 10 times tougher than all meteors ever identified in the same catalogue.

So the question is: was it from some unusual source very different from the solar system? Or was it artificial in origin? Maybe it was made of stainless steel, and was a spacecraft from another civilisation. We’re going to find out the composition — we are going to the Pacific Ocean this summer to look for the fragments leftover from this meteor. By collecting them from the ocean floor, we hope to figure out their composition and tell whether they were just a rock or part of a spacecraft.

FR: If it’s artificial, where might it come from?

AL: Freeman Dyson — a British-born scientist, very well-known about 60 years ago — suggested that a very advanced scientific civilisation would not just rely on the amount of energy coming from its star to the surface of its planet, but would surround the star with a megastructure that would harvest the energy of the star. It is called the “Dyson sphere”: it’s a huge engineering project to imagine. It could be made of tiles that are hovering above the star, just like very thin sails. But there would be very high stresses on the construction, and therefore it would be made of very tough material. Once the civilisation loses interest in the Dyson sphere, it might not maintain it, and then asteroids would hit it quite frequently and could destroy it within a billion years. So the pieces of a broken Dyson Sphere could float in interstellar space and they could account for the materials that we found in the interstellar meteor.

FR: But your theory about ‘Oumuamua is different — in your report you argue: “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth.”

AL: A very good approach, to probe a large region of space, is to release many small probes — like a dandelion seeding its environment. If you have a probe visiting the habitable zone of a star like the Sun, the probe itself might be too big and move too fast to land on a particular planet. If you want to probe a lot of regions and a lot of planets, you might just spread dandelion seeds. In fact, just this year, we founded a new space corporation with my colleague, Dr Frank Laukien, that aims to use this approach for the Moon and Mars, instead of the traditional approach of using just one big probe and visiting one location.

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FR: How do they propel themselves?

AL: It depends on the nature of the engine. The only type of engine that we employ so far for interstellar probes are chemical rockets that can push a probe up to about a thousandth of the speed of light. But there could be much better schemes. For example, a very distinguished British cosmologist named Hermann Bondi wrote a paper in 1957, suggesting that if you have a negative mass — we are used to positive masses, but a negative mass in principle is possible to construct — then the negative mass will push away, if you put the positive mass next to it. And the positive mass will pull the negative mass with it. So together, they would accelerate indefinitely up to the speed of light. That is a type of engine that we have never constructed, and could potentially be engineered, if we developed the physics behind it.

FR: So should we assume that an alien species could have far more sophisticated technology than we do?

AL: Yes, and the way I think of it, it’s just like going on a date. You can learn from the other person. We should look at it as an opportunity; we shouldn’t be fearful of it. We are probably not sophisticated enough to be a threat to whatever comes to visit us. But we can make money from it — if we learn how to replicate [the technology] here on Earth. We can get a leap into our future.

As for what they might be hoping to accomplish — if you stay on your planet, then you might be annihilated or destroyed by a single-point catastrophe — we will not know until we observe them. I don’t think it makes sense to establish a committee of experts, and decide what the protocol is for responding to visitors. We should just try and figure out what they’re seeking. I spoke to Henry Kissinger just last year, and I asked him — because he negotiated with other nations, where the culture is very different — what is the realpolitik of interstellar communication? And he said that first you want to learn what the other side is seeking, and only then develop a dialogue with them.

FR: Is there any evidence from observatories or telescopes that these probes are actually entering our solar system?

AL: The Government collects data as a result of national security concerns and the sensors the government is using are classified. If there is high-quality data, it’s not being released to the public. But an extraterrestrial technological object has nothing to do with national security. It doesn’t adhere to national borders, and therefore any knowledge about it should be shared by all humans. It shouldn’t be the privilege of the President of the United States. We know that we are not at the centre of the universe; we know that there are billions of other Earth-Sun systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We are not at the centre of the stage, and we just came to the cosmic play at the end ,over the past few million years. The play is not about us.

FR: Tell me what it’s like being an expert in aliens. It must be quite an odd field to choose as your specialism.

AL: The way to think of me is as a farm boy. I’m connected to nature more than people. I have no social media. I don’t care how many likes I get. I’m just trying to do what sounds like common sense — something today which is not that common (especially in academia). There are many of my colleagues working on extra dimensions of the multiverse who do fancy mathematics — and it’s their way of showing off that they are smart. But if there is an object from another civilisation that could change the future of humanity, it may not take fancy maths to realise that it’s not a rock. When there is data about something unusual, we’re supposed to be curious. There is uncertainty. You can be wrong. That’s part of the job description.

FR: What if you are a young junior professor, at a university like Harvard, when stepping outside the bounds of what’s considered acceptable science is too risky?

AL: If you look at the career of Pablo Picasso, you will find that early on, he was a realist. He tried to draw in the style of traditional painting. After he mastered that, he invented cubism, which was disruptive. So as a young scientist, you don’t want to disrupt the system. You want to learn first of all the basic principles of physics, and apply them along the themes that are defined by senior people in academia, so that you can get a postdoc position after your PhD. Eventually you’re promoted to tenure.

But what happens after people get tenure is they are even more obsessed with their ego. They want to get honours, awards — to be recognised by their peers — and they conform to the beaten path. I say that the road not taken is the most interesting thing to take, because it may have low-hanging fruit. So I advise young scholars: if you’re interested in innovation, once you get tenure, start to be creative: innovate, because that’s the whole purpose of academia. Betray the slogan of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984, “ignorance is strength”. That’s what academia should be about.

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But unfortunately, it’s not. I heard, a few days ago, a very distinguished scientist, who said: “I don’t really want to know whether Covid-19 came from a lab leak, or the wet market in Wuhan.” Why would he say that? Because he doesn’t want the image of science to be tarnished, if it came from a lab leak. This is similar to arguing that “ignorance is strength”. Knowledge is strength, and the same is true about the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena, the nature of dark matter. Everything should be driven by our ambition to be knowledgeable, because then we can adapt even if reality doesn’t look as pretty as it should be. Let us see it.

FR: There is a genuine cohort of your colleagues who would say that there is 0% probability that aliens do exist. What do you think the probability is of life beyond Earth?

AL: Galileo was placed under house arrest just for suggesting that maybe the Earth moves around the Sun, and today he would have been cancelled on social media. If you were to ask those theologians, they would say there is zero probability that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe. Now, why would they say that? Because the church wanted to control people. There are always ulterior motives. I bet you that if we find a piece of technological equipment from another civilisation, people will say: “Of course, this was talked about for decades. There is nothing really new — we knew it all along.”

But if I had to guess, I would say not only that we are not alone, but that there were many technological civilisations before us that reached greater heights. We are probably not even close to the top half of their advances. They would have technologies that look like magic to us — like miracles in religious texts. It’s possible that that civilisation could create life in its laboratories. It would bring the concept of God, or something very capable, into reality — it will unify science and religion in some sense. I think it’s very likely that they were out there billions of years ago, maybe not right now. But they existed, and the only question is, when will we find the conclusive evidence beyond any doubt? And for that, we need to search. If there are objects of technological origin, we will find them.

***

This transcript has been lightly edited.

The thing is, though, that Elon Musk is the future that the brilliant Huxley brothers spent their lives imagining; Aldous most famously in Brave New World (1932) and science-communicator Julian in a thousand books and articles and broadcasts on the quantity and quality of the human race on planet Earth.

Aldous and Julian would wonder why Mars was still so interesting for someone as clever as Musk. Human habitation of proximate planets was already an old idea for their generation. And not just as a science fiction trope. Emigration to the moon and Mars was tossed around all the time as a possible solution to one of the Huxley’s key political discussion points: overpopulation. Expenditure on settling other planets, Julian was convinced, would do nothing to alleviate the poverty that such crowding brought on Earth. His eminent brother Aldous was also firmly earthbound: neither population, nor hunger, nor land problems were going to be addressed by looking outward from Earth to the celestial bodies.

The trio would, inevitably, talk about population. Musk would probably tell them that, any day now, the world’s population will tick over to eight billion. Julian and Aldous would sit back and look at one another, shocked. In their time, they were both A-list speakers and lobbyists on the great post-war problem of overpopulation. But they had only imagined a future of up to four billion or so.

It is impossible to overstate the whole-Earth scale of the population problem in the years after the Second World War. The planetary crisis, then, — one of energy consumption — was not just similar to our own Anthropocene-crisis, but its direct antecedent. Julian and Aldous Huxley’s generation watched regional and global rates of net population growth accelerate in a manner unimaginable even to their grandfather, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. “Darwin’s bulldog”, a fierce supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution, was already worried in the late 19th century.

In 1957, Julian put it in terms of doubling: one billion in the mid-18th century, two billion by the mid-Twenties, and at its Fifties rate, he forecast, four billion by the Eighties. His brother put the same idea differently. “On the first Christmas Day”, Aldous wrote, there were about 250 million humans; this grew only slowly, so that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, there were perhaps 500 million. By the time he wrote Brave New World in 1932 there were almost 2 billion people on the planet. Just 27 years later, when he revisited his dystopia, human numbers were approaching 3 billion. That was the figure that sent the Huxley brothers, like so many others, into intellectual and political overdrive.

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Aldous wrote Brave New World Revisited in 1958, a non-fiction book naming something that was for him far more terrible than the fictional world he had created decades earlier: “The Age of Overpopulation.” For the Huxley brothers, world population growth was leading inexorably toward a catastrophic planetary future.

At my table, Musk might then lean forward and tell the Huxley brothers that as we approach eight billion on planet Earth in 2022, the average fertility rate has declined to 2.3 births per woman. That’s when the dinner party would either fall apart or come alive. For Elon Musk, this fertility rate is one of the great near-future problems. He tweets: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming.” He is not alone. We’ve heard quite a bit about an apparent cataclysm, for example in Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. In the Huxley era, similar catastrophic books were on the shelves, but they sold under titles like “Standing Room Only”, “Overfill” and “The Population Bomb”.

For Aldous and Julian Huxley, the astonishing fertility rate of 2.3 would be a breathtaking achievement. This was everything they had worked for. Planetary catastrophe had been averted! The future of humans on Earth, safe. Immodest Julian would think that the world had been wise, read his thousands of talks and books and papers on the unprecedented disaster that was population growth, and acted. The Huxley brothers simply couldn’t and wouldn’t understand how this decline could possibly be construed as a global problem.

Late in their lives, on this matter, the brothers were twinned: the same arguments, the same catastrophe, the same popular deployment of Huxley science and politics in every register and outlet possible. While Julian was writing articles on overpopulation for Playboy, Aldous was writing the same for Esquire. While Julian was broadcasting on the BBC, Aldous was speaking to ABC on population and world resources. Both used the widely recognised formula of “death control without birth control”. That is, the easily comprehensible idea that the public health control of infectious disease had been implemented across the world with incredible success especially in the reduction of infant mortality, but without any accompanying programs for birth control. The “balance is out”, as Aldous put it.

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In the post-war world, there were a range of reasons for being troubled by world population growth. One was geopolitical, especially as the Cold War unfolded, when population control policies were associated with US-led anti-communism. A higher standard of living, linked to fertility control in then-named third-world economies, was understood to offset hunger and thus political discontent. For the White House, population planning was about ensuring food security and keeping polities this side, not that side, of a communist line. For leaders of newly independent nation-states, not least Jawaharlal Nehru in India, lower fertility rates meant higher standards of living and economic “development”. For any number of economists, lowering fertility rates was a means of averting future wars. For Aldous Huxley, population control was a road to world peace.

For Julian, however, his desire to manage human fertility was largely driven by early environmentalist politics. He sought to save wildlife habitats from encroaching cultivation, all those additional acres turned to the plough to provide grain for ever-growing numbers of humans. He was also driven by a feminist politics of sorts. He argued his whole life that reliable birth control should be available to all women, not just some, and that there was little human freedom for women bearing eight, nine, 10 children out of their worn-out bodies. The good and the bad of population control and family-planning history is well known. Yet we need to recall how recent and unprecedented in human history effective contraception actually is. Julian knew it. His generation and milieu often considered birth control one of the great technological developments of humankind, as significant in the long history of human affairs, he would say, as fire, printing, or electricity: “In time it will change the entire course of history.” It has.

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It is sobering to observe how much more sensitive the Huxleys were to the gender dynamics of population policy than Musk and his ilk today. Women around the world are now opting en masse to have fewer children, and to do so later in life. The reasons are multiple: women are marrying later, retaining employment, getting educated, and accessing contraception. But collectively, this is one of the truly phenomenal changes of modern world history. In the UK, for example, the birth rate fell from 5.63 births per woman in the Huxleys’ grandfather’s time to 1.753 in our own. In India, it fell from at least 6.0 to 2.2 births per woman. But if the pro-natalists had their way, and this global trend towards lower fertility were to be reversed, it would be women bearing the brunt of it. And that would be impossible to justify.

As the planet approaches eight billion, the change in fertility rate since the Huxleys’ time means we need not be alarmed, as they were, by global “overpopulation”. Nor should we worry about an incorrectly named global “depopulation”. What we really need to be alarmed by are crude rationalisations for women to breed more. There lie the truly sinister lessons of history.

A name from the pages of legend: one of the finest independent bakers in all Hertfordshire! Surely, surely…

And it was then, peering through the glass, that she saw it. A squat golden figure, grinning and goggle-eyed. There could be no mistake: here was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, made entirely of marzipan.

Sarah knew at once that this was a gift from the gods. Only a few weeks before her father had taken her younger sister, Mary, to see E.T. at the cinema. Both had wept buckets. What was more, her father adored marzipan. She looked for a price tag. One pound seventy-five. Bargain!

If you’re wondering how I know all this, the answer lies in an online report on the BBC’s “Beds, Herts and Bucks” news page a few weeks ago, though I may have added a little fairy-tale stardust of my own. The marzipan E.T. figure still exists, which is why it made the news. As Jim’s daughter Mary explained, she found it after his death last year, perfectly preserved. A miracle? Well, not quite. Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it. “I am now its keeper,” she added, “and I’ll never eat it either.”

For those of us of a certain age, the only thing more terrifying than the prospect of eating 40-year-old marzipan is the realisation that fully four decades have elapsed since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. ruled the box office. I was almost eight when my parents took me to see it. I well remember my fascination with the basic premise — dwarfish alien botanist, disastrously stranded in the cultural desert of suburban California, is desperate to find his way home — and can even more vividly recall my utter desolation when it seemed the ugly little fellow’s race was run. And I’m happy to report that Spielberg’s film has lost none of its power. We watched it with my son during one of the lockdowns, and my wife’s decision to invest in a huge packet of tissues was richly vindicated. (He cried too, but not as much as me.)

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The story behind E.T. is well known, and has never better been told than in the review by Time’s critic, Richard Corliss, a few days before the film’s release in June 1982:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia. His house was just like everybody else’s house; his family’s car and dog and swimming pool were just like everybody else’s too. But little Steven’s dreams were different. He dreamed of telling the stories of his strange land — wonderful tales of his home and his school, his parents and especially his friends — and making them shine like new. So every night he would tiptoe outside his ranch-style house and make a wish on the brightest star in the suburban sky. Over and over he would whisper, “Help me tell the story …”

E.T. is a fairy-tale about growing up in suburbia and dreaming of the world beyond. It’s a film about feeling different and struggling to fit in, about the outsider hiding within us all. It’s also, very famously, a film about a child — the hero, Eliott — wounded by his parents’ divorce. Spielberg had been deeply hurt by his own parents’ separation in the early Sixties, and had actually been working on a fictionalised version of their story before he turned to E.T.. And even now, 40 years on, it remains a sublimely affecting account of what family trauma does to an impressionable child — all the more so because it is, of course, a child’s escapist fantasy.

But E.T. is also very obviously a film of a particular era. The late Seventies and early Eighties are much in vogue at the moment. ABBA — peak years 1976 to 1981 — have retaken the stage to rapturous applause, albeit in digital avatar form. Star Wars’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, created by Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas in 1977, now has a Disney series of his own. A fourth Indiana Jones film, continuing the story Spielberg and Lucas began in 1981, is out next year. Even Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which currently dominates the box office, tries to recapture the spirit of the mid-Eighties, Ronald Reagan’s shiny, swaggering, shoulder-padded heyday, when it was forever morning again in America.

There’s an obvious generational explanation for all this. If, like me, you remember sobbing at the cinema as E.T. lay dying, then you’re probably in your late forties or early fifties, easy prey for the nostalgia industry. Life is more complicated than it used to be: more hectic, more stressful, more fraught with compromise and disappointment. As the accountants at Disney’s streaming service know only too well, it’s natural to yearn for the simplicity and innocence of childhood. When you watch E.T. now and feel the tears pricking at your eyeballs, are you crying for the alien, or for Elliott — or for yourself?

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Were the late Seventies and early Eighties really a more innocent time, though? No, of course not. Flick through the pages of any newspaper and you see stories just as heart-breaking and hair-raising as any you’d find today: revolution and war in the Middle East, bloody repression in Poland, a child-abuse panic in America, terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. For Spielberg’s generation, the scars of Watergate and Vietnam were still painfully raw – as were memories of the Holocaust, which his Orthodox Jewish parents had often discussed with him when he was growing up. “I was a scared kid,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone in 2007. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives.”

But there was a palpable difference between then and now, and you need only rewatch a film like E.T. or the original Star Wars to see it. For all Spielberg’s talk about private horrors, both films are fundamentally, unselfconsciously optimistic. People are decent, Han Solo has a heart of gold, and tomorrow really will be brighter than today. In E.T., for example, much of the tension surrounds a shadowy group of government agents who are determined to capture the alien for themselves. At first glance it seems all very Watergate, echoing Seventies conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View. But it turns out that their leader, “Keys”, is actually a thoroughly decent fellow, a grown-up version of young Elliott himself. Official America, in other words, isn’t so bad after all. “I’ve been wishing for this,” Keys says at one point, “since I was 10 years old.” It’s hard to imagine a US government agent in 2022 being given a line like that.

Both films also share a fundamental faith in modernity itself: in science, technology and the idea of the future. In Star Wars, it’s true that the ships and uniforms are battered and grubby, reflecting a sense of decline since the Empire replaced the Republic — a very Roman theme. But none of the characters ever doubts that technology is good for them. There are no environmental costs; you can fire up your speeder as often as you like without worrying about climate change. Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence, except for the barman at the Mos Eisley cantina (“We don’t serve their kind here”). Like E.T.’s alien plant-enthusiast, droids are useful, good-natured, even kind-hearted. They’re not trying to take over the world. They’re just trying to help.

If you want an insight into the mentality behind films like E.T., perhaps the best place to go is the Nasa visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, a vast monument to the optimism of a vanished age. The entire experience is infused with a sense of faith: in America, in technology, in progress, in humanity itself. On the screens above you, a succession of elderly men and women with reassuring Midwestern accents talk of comradeship and teamwork, duty and commitment. None of them questions whether it was worth it, or doubts that they were doing the right thing. And the entire experience is underpinned by a sense of narrative, a story driving towards a moment of apotheosis. That moment, of course, is 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. “The first thing I think about when I think about the Sixties,’” Spielberg told Rolling Stone, “is when we landed on the moon.”

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But my overwhelming impression after visiting Nasa a few months ago, rather like my feeling after rewatching E.T., was simply one of nostalgia. Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was more than a half a century ago; for children today, it is as remote as the Battle of the Somme was to children in 1969. To put it bluntly, the moment has passed. The Space Race is over. Nasa’s government funding has dried up; it relies heavily on private sponsorship now. When we think of technology today, we often think of the costs, not the benefits. Despite the miracle of the Covid vaccines, a believer in scientific progress today runs a gauntlet of cynicism and disillusionment. And who now believes in the future?

So if there was a film in the summer of 1982 that foreshadowed our present, it wasn’t E.T.. It was a competitor released just two weeks later, which performed very poorly at the box-office but became one of the most aesthetically influential science-fiction visions ever made. With its neon cities shrouded in smog and pollution, its streets crowded with rogues, immigrants, whores and replicants, its nightmarish future of driving rain and endless night, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner could hardly feel more different from the moral universe of Spielberg’s fairy-tale. But today our world seems closer to Scott’s vision than to Spielberg’s. And perhaps that’s why E.T. still commands such power, as a reminder of what we’ve lost.

All of which, of course, brings us back to that marzipan. As Jim Robson’s daughter Mary told the BBC, they would get it out now and again in the intervening years, to remind them of days gone by. “It was nice to see it again, it’s like a familiar face, so finding it wasn’t sad because it just always made us laugh,” she said wistfully. “I took it home to look after and I haven’t put it away. I like to see it every day.”

A bittersweet story, then. But perhaps the last word should go to St Albans’s equivalent of the engineers behind the Apollo missions, the director of Simmons Bakers. He was pleased to hear that their creation had lasted forty years, he said. “But I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.”

For decades, the EU has been providing heroic floods of funding for peculators, perhaps the greatest such flows the world has seen. From 2014 to 2020, the bloc spent €960 billion, and to 2027 has plans for €1,820 billion more. Of these scarcely fathomable sums, around two-thirds goes on various forms of regional and industrial support.

Estimates in the relatively well-policed UK suggest you can expect anything from 2% to 10% of project money to be syphoned off via fraud, collusion, or bribery. But Brussels has long been reluctant to exert central control over its cascades of cash. Only this year has it established a European Public Prosecutor’s Office to pursue malfeasance: despite a tiny budget, in its first few months EPPO has accumulated more than 300 cases. Yet the value encompassed, €4.5 billion, is microscopic compared to the scale of the problem.

This is largely a result of the lack of central oversight, which means you can’t disaggregate skewed spending from theft. You’ll never tally which eye-watering sums have been misallocated, misappropriated, or simply stolen. The best you can do is survey the mechanisms that foment intellectual corruption, and can lead to all the criminal ills.

Take one of its biggest programmes: agriculture, fisheries, and environmental good works, which account for €774 billion of the 2014-27 totals. Leave aside, if you can, the “small scale” rural defraudations over many decades, which by now must total many billions. It’s the essence of the EU’s rural policy that’s obscene, for it’s built on tariffs around food that are passed onto the consumer. Development economists will tell you that, even as latterly reformed, this costs Europe’s consumers over €20 billion a year. This number is a good surrogate for the income denied annually to the poor farmers in the global South who would love to feed the EU’s people.

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Astronomical sums are also spent on space, where the EU works with outfits such as the European Space Agency. The numbers here are deliberately obscured, but in recent years, upwards of €36 billion has been budgeted. The EU’s space policy amounts to a me-first system of outdoor relief for a charmed circle of giant French-controlled firms, with others involved for cosmetic decoration. Step forward Arianespace, run by Airbus (France-Germany-Spain) and Safran (France). Offshoots of Leonardo (Italy’s state-run defence champion) and Thales (France) are also prominent. The Union’s space trajectories reached their apogee with the Galileo scheme to send GPS satellites whizzing above the earth. As far as the numbers tell you, this wheeze has so far absorbed over €10 billion. The bizarre rationale was to rival the perfectly adequate American system, which reserves its tightest accuracy for military use by the US and its allies. Was the EU expecting America to invade? In a further moment of madness, the Chinese were asked to join, though they were later disinvited. After Brexit, Britain was scandalously expelled, though non-EU members Israel, Norway and Switzerland are kept in.

Also among the big boondoggles are central allocations to R&D under programmes dubbed Horizon. From 2014 to 2027 they will total €176 billion. Here, too, the beneficiaries are mainly an established club of “Old EU” companies in France and Germany, plus selected chums in academia. (Britain was a major taker until it left.) The in-built bias was underscored during the latest seven-year spending round, when the newish 11 members in Central and Eastern Europe, despite having a fifth of the EU’s population, were vouchsafed a mere 5% of the largesse available. Meanwhile, famous EU states such as Israel and Switzerland received much more. And has anyone monitored the real-world sales and profits resulting from all that spending? What do you think?

Ensconced in Luxembourg is the European Investment Bank. This is a huge machine for channelling financial subsidies to the Union‘s banks and projects. The EIB does this by borrowing ultra-cheaply on the back of guarantees from the member states. As of the middle of this year the EIB had €179 billion out to financial institutions and €342 billion to other borrowers. The EIB is forever trying to reconcile bankerly professionalism with massive political pressures. It often fails. It’s especially lax in its subsidies to financial institutions, as the modus operandi is to offer overall funding lines that the entities in question use to on-lend at will. Full disclosure: I spent some time as a Head of Division at the EIB, and saw the political machinations first-hand.

Many peculative possibilities come from the plethora of mainstream EU schemes for regional and industrial spending. Even when the goal is a worthy hospital, road, railway or factory, abusive opportunities abound. Start with the local or central governmental satrapies which sponsor many of the projects. They have an inherent tendency to over-specify (the EU’s grants are “free”, after all) and to mismanage the implementation. Greedy advisers and construction firms egg them on. Contractual fiddles can cut links between performance and payment. Central governments (which provide counterpart financing) and EU bureaucrats are complicit, as it’s in everyone’s interest to get the money out of the door. As we’ve seen, when it’s embroiled, the EIB is often swayed by the politicians too.

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Yes, public tenders are stipulated by the EU for most procurement: there are €1,900 billion-worth each year. But it’s easy to fiddle the specifications and the criteria for selection. In particular, Italy, Austria, Spain, Greece, and Portugal have long had poor reputations with their public tenders. In recent years, Hungary, Cyprus, Romania, and Bulgaria have come galloping up the track, and are poised to overtake. Hungary has already won some sort of prize, as PM Viktor Orbán notoriously rewards his chums via hand-steered EU contracts; the country is to receive €22 billion in regional funds to from 2021 to 2027, and more in post-Covid aid.

For decades, the resultant cases of waste and theft have been scattered across Europe. Among the thousands of suspect schemes, notable clumps are in southern Italy, Spain, and in Germany’s once new Länder. A classic of over-investment is Spain’s high-speed rail network. It has absorbed €56 billion over the past 35 years, €14 billion from the Union, but remains chronically underused. One external report put the inappropriate allocation of public funds (to 2016) at €26 billion. The euphemistic plea was voiced for “Transparency in hidden agendas behind public works”. Compared with such herculean Hispanic achievements, the case of Berlin’s new airport seems modest. Supported by the EIB, its cost has exploded from €2.8 billion to €10.3 billion or more. Finally open after 14 years, it’s still not fully functional.

The cases keep coming. Just the other day, the Financial Times revealed to a shocked German railways and to bemused German public prosecutors that the prized scheme for rebuilding the central Stuttgart station, part-funded by Brussels, was allegedly riddled with peculative ills. The original cost, €2.5 billion, has more than tripled to €8.2 billion (and counting). The FT suggested that much of the inflation was due to glaring mismanagement and corruption, one source putting the scale of the peculation so far at €600 million.

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Until EPPO came along the Union’s only policeman was the notoriously feeble control body OLAF, which was supposed to work with another weak entity, the European Court of Auditors. They might as well not have bothered: last year, OLAF itself recommended recoveries of a paltry €293 million. However glaring the case, OLAF was duty-bound to pass it to the given country’s justice system. And all too frequently, local jurisprudence has proved ineffective. This is down to incompetence (Germany) or design (the newish East have underinvested in their legal systems, in many countries prosecutors and courts have been suborned).

From now, EPPO will have criminal law powers while OLAF will concentrate on administrative ills. But don’t expect them to do more than dent the peculation that travels along with the Brussels money juggernaut. They are a mere few hundred-strong. And the vested interests are simply too great, the huge sums of money too tempting. When, in the 19th century, Lord Acton famously said that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely, peculation was still in common use. In today’s EU, a variant of this still holds true: lack of control over spending corrupts, absolute lack of control can cause absolute corruption.

On 17 January, 1912, Scott and his men arrived at the South Pole — only to find that Roald Amundsen had got there first. Turning back in defeat, they perished on their way home.

Let’s wish Jeff Bezos better luck, because next Tuesday he, too, is making a perilous journey. On that day the richest man in the world — net worth $177 billion — will zoom into space aboard his own rocket. But, unlike Scott, he sets off knowing he’s been pipped to the post, the Amundsen in this tale being Britain’s beloved train controller Richard Branson, just back from a jaunt to the cosmos on his Virgin Galactic spaceplane.

Except that Blue Origin, the Bezos space company, isn’t having it. They say that outer space starts at the Kármán line — an altitude of 100 kilometres. Because Branson didn’t go quite that high, his trip doesn’t really count. 

The Kármán line, though, is arbitrary; the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t suddenly stop at a suspiciously round number, it fades out. One can set the boundary a bit lower (as the US Air Force does) — in which case Branson did go into space. 

If this spat looks like a “pissing contest” (as a Virgin Galactic test pilot put it in a since-deleted tweet) then that’s because it clearly is. Space travel is becoming the ultimate positional good — and space ships the playthings of billionaires. With the relative decline of nation-states and the rise of the super-rich, perhaps this was inevitable; after all, people have often described the wealthy as seeing the world from 30,000 ft, so why not 300,000?

It’s significant, however, that Bezos should be the one leading the way, not just because of his vast riches, but for the means by which he made them. The immense gulf between him and his deunionised, demoralised workers has now acquired full physical expression.

It’s not just Bezos and Branson duking it out. The second richest man in the world, Elon Musk — worth a mere $150 billion — also has a rocket ship venture, SpaceX. Musk has been admirably frank about the whole thing, telling volunteers that a few of them may die in the process, although Elon also hopes to send a million people to Mars.

Even this parade of egos is humble compared to the man really responsible for the space race, Donald Trump, at least in his own mind. “I made it possible for them to do this”, the former president modestly observed in a recent interview. He has no plans to go into space himself, however. 

Space tourism dates back to the year when hyper-globalisation began, 2001. It was then that Dennis Tito became the first to pay his way to the stars, hailing a ride with the Russians. But with Branson’s successful flight, space tourism is now set to become a growth industry; Virgin Galactic is said to have pre-sold 600 seats, and prospective passengers reportedly include Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber. 

All rockets have a Freudian quality, due to the very nature of physics, but the shape of the New Shepard is so rude it could have been designed by Joe Orton.

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For all the theatrics, however, this isn’t just billionaire boys and their toys — they’re actually making important breakthroughs, especially on cost. The key challenge with space is not how far away it is, but that it’s directly above us. Lifting mass against the gravitational pull of the Earth requires a huge expenditure of energy and therefore cash. 

A key metric is how much it costs to lift one kilogram into low Earth orbit (LEO). According to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy analyst, the “cost to LEO” between 1970 and 2000 was about $18,500 per kilo, while America’s Space Shuttle was even more expensive at $54,500 per kilo.   

However, the new generation of privately-developed space vehicles has brought costs tumbling down. A paper by Harry Jones of the NASA Ames Research Centre quotes a figure of just $2,720 per kilo for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In other words, the billionaires are transforming the economics of spaceflight, and if this trend continues it will indeed be affordable to, if not the many, then more of the few.

That’s so often the way with private enterprise. While it’s become fashionable to emphasise the role of the state in getting new technologies off the ground (literally in this case), it takes the discipline of the bottom line to turn expensive inventions into affordable products. 

One can always complain about the how the rich got rich, but if they use their wealth to achieve something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise then perhaps it’s worth the injustice.

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And there’s much more at stake here than opening-up space tourism to mere millionaires. This really could be one giant leap for us all. Space-based internet services like StarLink and OneWeb are already launching, and before long, nowhere on Earth need be offline. Looking further ahead, we can see exciting possibilities for space-based solar power, zero-gravity manufacturing and asteroid mining. Without even leaving our solar system, we can dream — realistically — of a new age of abundance.

However, that depends on getting one thing straight: space is no place for people. The solar system may be full of natural resources, but from a human habitation point of view it is, quite frankly, a shithole. Think of the least hospitable place on the planet: Antarctica. Unless you’re a scientist, you’d be mad to want to live there. Yet, compared to everywhere apart from Earth, it’s really quite cosy: there’s air, water, temperatures that won’t kill you instantly, and a lack of deadly radiation. Luxury.

So if we can’t imagine the large-scale colonisation of Antartica anytime soon, then we can forget about Mars or the Moon — where the difficulties are multiplied a million-fold. Inevitably, humankind will get its grubby mitts on the solar system’s resources by sending up robots instead.

The greatest danger of the Branson and Bezos space race is that by putting themselves front-and-centre of space exploration, they’re actually slowing down our progress to the stars. Heroic, but essentially pointless, trips are a distraction. We’d do much better to concentrate our efforts on deploying machines that can keep going without air, gravity, sleep or publicity. That doesn’t mean that we cut ourselves out of the picture completely, but we need to work from home on this one. 

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The alternative is that, over the decades, we build-up a human workforce in Earth orbit and beyond. Given the cost constraints, the bare minimum will be done to make their lives tolerable. Indeed, the economic incentive to immiserate the space-based working class would be overwhelming.

Throughout human history, the taming of frontiers has involved exploitation, sometimes extreme and vicious. Examples include the Trans-Atlantic slave trade; the transportation of convicts to Australia; and the use of indentured labour in the American colonies. For a modern-day example look at the international shipping industry — the worst parts of which are notorious for the maltreatment of crew members. Lying beyond national jurisdictions, the High Seas are the closest Earthly equivalent to outer space — and the most plausible model for a spaced-based economy. 

The sheer luxury of space tourism is a false dawn. As a source of income, it may help sustain the spaceflight industry and its progress on costs — but that’s just the trouble. If we make it economically viable to transport workers instead of tourists we can be sure that they’ll be exploited. Utterly dependent on their employers for their most basic needs and with no way home, they’ll be in a uniquely vulnerable position as corporations turn the heavens into hell. If you thought workers’ rights were bad under globalisation, wait until we let the billionaires have the entire solar system.

I think aliens might just be visiting earth — and I reckon there is an intriguing psychological link with Covid-19.

Before you click off this website, and permanently erase it from your memory, let me explain with some context, and some history.

First, the aliens. Next month, the Pentagon will deliver an eagerly awaited report, detailing all its observations of UFOs over decades. Excitement has been building for a while, but in recent days it has become feverish. Serious people are taking this seriously.

Could they really be right? I think: yes, it is just possible — and this is where you need the history.

In January 2020 I was writing a book in Bangkok, Thailand. The sun was hot, the beers were cold; life was pretty good. Then the first rumours began to swirl: of a fatal respiratory virus, running out of control in China. As I was spending much of my Bangkok time in air-conditioned bars, alongside happy Chinese tourists, I paid some attention.

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I paid even more attention when I flew back to London, at the end of January, and developed an odd, persistent “flu”. It was nasty, yet it fluctuated. I then gave it to my wife, who coughed so badly on the Tube she nearly fainted (sorry, London). At this point I genuinely started to wonder, and so I called Public Health England to recount my symptoms, just in case.

To my surprise they went bananas. They ordered me to a hospital for isolation, and said I maybe had coronavirus or “Avian Flu”. I googled Avian Flu and found that it has a mortality rate of 50%. After drinking an entire bottle of wine in 15 minutes I rushed to the hospital, where there was much confusion: this was very early in the pandemic. The promised testing didn’t happen, and in time the “flu” abated.

My illness remains a mystery, but it did have one definite consequence: I immediately became obsessed with the new pestilence. Over the following week I read every scholarly article I could find; I watched the videos of Chinese people being welded into apartments. By mid-February my mental job was done. I knew we were headed for a global plague, because the exponential logic of pandemics is relentless. So I bought my first masks, and stocked up on tuna — and then I tried to warn my friends.

This, it turned out, was a hopeless task. No matter how many graphs, extrapolations, and gory Tweets I showed them, nothing worked. They laughed, they scoffed, they made bets against my maths. Some were kind of resentful.

It was an unexpected response, so I did more research. Pretty swiftly I discovered that I was butting up against a known mental block. It is called Normalcy Bias, and it describes the common human disposition to reject appalling information, and to presume that extraordinarily bizarre or terrible things never happen.

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Normalcy Bias explains, it is thought, why the people of Pompeii simply stared at the eruption of Vesuvius, for hours, instead of fleeing. Normalcy Bias could also explain the workers who sat in the Twin Towers and carried on typing, even as the second plane crumpled into the glass.

And this is where the aliens come in. As happened with coronavirus, I have become modestly obsessed by the new alien story. I have watched all the videos: of the black blob hovering near to the USS Omaha, of the “Tic Tac” UFO disobeying the laws of physics. I’ve read the eye-witness reports from pilots, I’ve listened to baffled Pentagon experts. Most of all I’ve gazed on, boggle eyed, as much of the US journalistic and political Establishment, from Fox News to the New York Times, from Senator Mario Rubio to Former President Barack Obama, have all lined up behind the hypothesis that Yes, there might be aliens.

To give you a flavour of these mind-bending analyses, here’s one, from the foreign policy expert Tom Rogan on the conservative Washington Examiner.

First he examines the “less dramatic” explanations for the UAPs (ie: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a new initialism invented to take away the “stigma” of “seeing UFOs”). He wonders if the UFOs are secret, advanced American tech, and the US is spooking itself or others. Or perhaps this is Chinese technology, and Beijing has developed aircraft that can fly at 15,000mph, without anyone really noticing.

Then Rogan addresses the other hypothesis — which he believes should be put to Congress. “The most compelling UFOs, those UFOs which lack conventional alternative explanation after exhaustive investigation, give credible indication of being highly advanced, intelligently controlled vehicles… beyond the understood technical capacity of any Earth nation.”

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He goes on: “This sounds extraordinary, and it is. But even if not offered formally in writing, it is also the truth recognised by those who have worked intimately on this issue. After all, these most compelling UFOs evince means of non-jet propulsion-based hypersonic travel in the air and in space, and of 100 knots-plus speeds underwater. Some UFOs also show apparent anti-gravity capabilities, reflected by their instantaneous acceleration and deceleration…”

If you’re like me, you’ll have read these sentences, written by a mainstream US journalist, with mounting incredulity. Is he really saying alien craft are cruising our skies? Surely not. There are so many unanswered questions. How did the aliens get here? What’s their fascination with nukes? Why are all the photos and videos so grainy? If they can fly faster than light, why can’t they hide properly? I scoff at these ideas, I laugh at them and I kind of resent the stupidity.

And that’s the point, I am actively averse to this news story, in the same peculiar way my friends reacted to my prophesies of plague back in early 2020. To me this UFO flap feels like a religious spasm, a fearsome portent in the sky: not unknown during plagues. But is it? How do I know I am not exhibiting Normalcy Bias? How can I be sure I am not standing in the piazza in Pompeii, munching a panino, even as the volcano blows?

I don’t have an answer, but I remember Early Covid, and how I overcame Normalcy Bias back then. A pivotal moment came as I watched the mighty quarantine efforts in China, sealing off 60m people. It dawned on me that the Chinese authorities would only take these horrific steps, so damaging to their own economy, if they saw something deeply troubling. I began to sense the danger. I went to buy my tuna.

And now I am watching, once again: as half of the American elite, which is closer to this UAP narrative than everyone else, reacts with quite surreal alarm. What are they seeing that I can’t? What explains this crazy over-reaction? And so I go back to the UFO videos, and those gyrating blobs of grainy light, calmly looking back at us across the swaying Pacific waves.

Neither Russia nor China is signing the NASA-led “Artemis Accords” agreed this month between the spacefaring nations of the USA, UK, Italy, Canada, Australia, UAE and Japan. The Accords govern the exploration of the Moon and extraction of its resources; signatories must keep each other informed of their activities during the operation to land the first woman, and next man, on the Moon within four years. These landings are planned as the next giant step for mankind before creating Moon bases for mining purposes by 2028. In turn, these bases could be the launch pad to “enable human expansion across the solar system”.

Russia is a NASA partner on the International Space Station but was excluded from the accords after the newly formed US Space Force accused it of tracking US spy satellites in a dangerous and “unusual and disturbing manner”. China cannot be part of the agreement because Congress has banned NASA from working with Beijing. Both have their own plans for lunar bases, but are not about to allow rivals to establish a set of “rules” which do not involve them.

Going ahead without everyone agreeing is, according to the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, an “invasion” of the Moon which could turn it into “another Afghanistan or Iraq”. That’s fighting talk.

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Moscow and Beijing are particularly concerned about the articles allowing the signatories to establish “safety zones” on the Moon to protect the area in which a country is working. Nations are asked to “respect” the zones in order to “prevent harmful interference”. This throws up the scenario of a Russian spaceship landing within a zone, setting up shop next door to a Japanese or American base, and the new arrivals getting their drills out. By what law could the Japanese or Americans object, and in the absence of law, what would they do about it?

They could hardly turn to the now horribly outdated 1967 document popularly known as the Outer Space Treaty upon which most of the rules governing the use of space are based. It says “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. A safety zone looks an awful lot like national appropriation, and the Moon could get awfully crowded.

That is partly because space travel is no longer only the domain of powerful states. Getting out there is becoming cheaper and within reach of private companies, as Elon Musk and others demonstrate, and we can expect competition for the Moon’s resources. But there is usually a link between commercial outfits and the state — the East India company comes to mind.

The Outer Space Treaty says the Moon “shall” be used only for peaceful purposes. It doesn’t define peaceful and once you’ve put “facts on the Moon” it would be easy to argue that you needed defensive weapons, not for aggression, but to ensure the peace.

The treaty is also outdated in many ways. It was drawn up at a time when people thought of outer space as a featureless void and politically different to Earth. It’s true that the Soviet/American space race took place within the frame of the Cold War, but it was mostly about prestige — which political model could prove itself superior. Since then a new way of thinking has arisen and with it, new “astropolitical” theories.

Space exploration can be viewed as an opportunity, indeed a requirement, for states to fully cooperate via the international system for the benefit of all humanity. However, another view assumes the great powers will seek to dominate space to achieve commercial and military dominance — this is realpolitik for space — astropolitik.

Both views start from an understanding that space is not featureless, but is, in the words of astropolitik theorist Everett Dolman, “a rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy alternately dispersed and concentrated, broadly strewn danger zones of deadly radiation…”.

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Dolman builds on the writings of the great twentieth century geopolitical theorists Halford Mackinder and Alfred Mahan. Both helped shape strategic thinking by drawing on geographic realities, territories, and how new technologies could impact them. Students of geopolitics are familiar with how the corridors of trade, and who controls them, have played a major role in history. Astropolitics takes a similar approach and applies it to the cosmos looking at place, distance, fuel supplies, and a lot of science.

The starting point is Earth and control of the narrow corridor around it, namely low Earth orbit. This is where our communication, and increasingly our military, satellites are placed. In the future, control of this belt will give countries a huge military advantage across the earth’s surface. Without binding treaties limiting the militarisation of space, this is a probable battlefield for military weapons aimed firstly at rivals within the belt, and then below it. As a commander in China’s People’s Liberation Army put it: “If you control space, you can also control the land and the sea”.

Low orbit is also the area where spacecrafts seeking to travel further than the Moon could be refuelled. Mars is millions of miles further away from Earth than the Moon, but because of the incredible effort required to slip the bounds of Earth’s gravity, more energy is required to get from there to the Moon than from low orbit to Mars. If one powerful state gained full control of this corridor, it could prevent rivals from refuelling within it and thus hamper their ability to travel further.

There are several other key geographic regions in Space. For example, the Van Allen radiation belts have such a high concentration of radiation that crewed spaceships are better off avoiding them. Spend too long there and the crafts electronics may begin to fail, as might the crew. There are also “libration” points — a network of pathways around planets a spacecraft can use to avoid the drag of a planet’s gravity slowing it down. That is for the medium term, but in the short term the libration points between the earth, the Moon, and one just past the Moon, may become areas of competition.

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There are five of these points, all places where the gravitational effects of the Earth and the Moon balance out. This means an object stationed at one of them would be able to stay where it was without having to use fuel. Two in particular are in locations allowing a commanding “view” down to the belt containing satellites. Another, known as L2, is on the far side of the Moon. China has stationed a satellite there allowing it to see what is happening on the “dark side” which, by no coincidence, is where they are considering establishing a base.

These are the type of geographical realities we may become more accustomed to hearing about as astropolitics comes of age and the great powers integrate space warfare into their military budgets. Russia and China have both made organisational changes in their military as have the Americans with the formation of the US Space Force.

There are concerns that this activity violates the Outer Space treaty, but it only states that weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear missiles should not be placed “in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner”. There’s nothing in international law to prevent the stationing of laser armed satellites capable of attempting to shoot down another country’s hypersonic missiles from above. Every page of history suggests that if one country does it, so will another, and then another.

The treaty needs rewriting to reflect today’s technology whilst keeping the spirit of the text and its promise that exploration “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind”. We saw the possibilities as early as 1975 when Soviet and American spaceships docked, the hatches opened, and the crew members shook hands. Since then astronauts from 10 countries have lived and worked together on the International Space Station, and international organisations have been set up to monitor our oceans and atmosphere. We’ve reached the high ground; it is mainfestly our destiny to go higher, and we will get there more quickly if we do it together.

So, manned spaceflight: been there, done that, let’s not go again. Rather, let’s pay more attention to the hugely more consequential business of unmanned spaceflight and satellite technology.

There’s important stuff happening over your head right now – and you need to know about it.

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Peter Franklin

For instance, that irrepressible scamp Elon Musk has been up to his tricks again. This time he’s only gone and launched a ‘train’ of 60 satellites into space – and obtained the authorisation to launch thousands more. Indeed, the plan is that the SpaceX Starlink fleet will consist of nearly 12,000 satellites with the objective of providing space-based internet services anywhere on Earth.

This would be of great benefit to unconnected parts of the world. However, it’s widely reported that astronomers are not happy – believing that Starlink and other satellite ‘constellations’ will interfere with their observations of the night sky.

A report for Forbes by Jonathan O’Callaghan conveys their mounting alarm:

“SpaceX is one of nine companies known to be working on global space internet, and already concerns have been raised about space junk. Now astronomers too are worried about what the future may hold.

“‘The potential tragedy of a mega-constellation like Starlink is that for the rest of humanity it changes how the night sky looks,’ says Ronald Drimmel from the Turin Astrophysical Observatory in Italy. ‘Starlink, and other mega constellations, would ruin the sky for everyone on the planet.’”

But while the proliferation of satellites may make it harder for us to look up, they’ll make it easier for us to look down.

There’s nothing new about satellite imagery, of course. It’s been around for decades. However, according to Christopher Beam in MIT Technology Review, the intensity of space-based surveillance is about to hit a whole new level:

“Every year, commercially available satellite images are becoming sharper and taken more frequently. In 2008, there were 150 Earth observation satellites in orbit; by now there are 768…

“Maxar, formerly DigitalGlobe, which launched the first commercial Earth observation satellite in 1997, is building a constellation that will be able to revisit spots 15 times a day. BlackSky Global promises to revisit most major cities up to 70 times a day.”

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Gerard DeGroot

It’s not only the frequency of coverage that’s going to increase, but also the detail of the images:

“Commercial satellite imagery is currently in a sweet spot: powerful enough to see a car, but not enough to tell the make and model; collected frequently enough for a farmer to keep tabs on crops’ health, but not so often that people could track the comings and goings of a neighbor. This anonymity is deliberate. US federal regulations limit images taken by commercial satellites to a resolution of 25 centimeters, or about the length of a man’s shoe.”

With so many more satellites in space owned by interests all over the world, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the American and other western governments to restrict the availability of espionage-grade satellite images.

Conceivably, every location on Earth will be photographed at high resolution, many times a day – and not just in the visible part of the spectrum, but also other wavelengths capable of gathering other kinds of data – heat signatures, for instance. AI-powered advances in image analysis will mean that ever-greater levels of intelligence can be derived from what the eyes in the sky see of our daily lives.

Worried yet? You should be.

Suggested reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

Of course, there are privacy concerns surrounding other surveillance technologies – CCTV and, more lately, drones. However, as Beam reminds us, these are subject to regulation by sovereign states. Space, however – the high frontier – is pretty much a free for all:

“The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by the US, the Soviet Union, and dozens of UN member states, gives all states free access to space, and subsequent agreements on remote sensing have enshrined the principle of ‘open skies.’”

My guess is that we’ll respond to the threat of space-based surveillance with ground-based counter- surveillance. Beam paints a scenario in which satellite imagery is used to analyse patterns of light spilling out from windows, from which one could work out which buildings are most likely to be unoccupied at any particular time. Vehicle movement analysis could yield the same information – which would, of course, be of great interest to burglars. In all likelihood, criminals and terrorists will soon know a great more about our daily routines than they do now.

So what do we do about it? The obvious answer is to build-out CCTV and drone networks so that the authorities charged with our protection know more about what the bad guys are up to than the bad guys know about us. Burglary, for instance, would be rendered unviable if, from the moment of a break-in, the burglars were inescapably captured on camera – all the way from our houses to their houses.

It’ll be some time before satellites are sufficiently numerous and powerful to provide continuous real-time video coverage of the Earth. However, in particular locations, this is already possible using ground and air-based technologies. Expect the threat from space to accelerate the spread of defensive surveillance across entire cities, regions and nations.

Let’s hope those in charge have our best interests at heart.

I’ll begin with something that happened to me a while back. I was walking from a quiet country railway station to my parents’ house – a distance of about a mile. It was dark and the road was deserted, but I was fine with that.

And then I saw the lights. Four of them. At first I thought they were aircraft coming into Gatwick, which wasn’t far away. But there was none of the usual jet engine noise. And in any case, the lights were too still and, as far as I could tell, too low and too near.

Suggested reading

Is there anyone else out there?

By Peter Franklin

I was looking across a field; beyond it, a hillside was just about visible against the night sky. The lights, I realised, were below the ridgeline – so I thought they might be shining from the hillside. Except that I knew there were no houses there. No buildings of any kind, just woodland. Bonfires, was my next thought.

And then I saw that they were moving. Slowly, but in perfect formation – and parallel to my own path. I’ll admit: at that point my blood ran cold. Or was it just the gust of wind behind my back? Because that’s what gave it away: the wretched things were Chinese lanterns drifting along in the breeze…

The UFOs turned out to be no more than an irresponsible party gimmick. And, yes, I did feel stupid for not realising that straight away. Yet I’m grateful for the experience. For a moment the ordinary world had given way beneath my feet, leaving me struggling to explain the evidence my eyes presented me with. That brief moment of wonder and terror left me with a lot more sympathy for those who have more enduring encounters with the unexplained.

UFOs have been back in the news lately following a development first reported by Bryan Bender in Politico last month:

“The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

“The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says.”

While not leaping to conclusions, it seems that the US Navy is keeping an open mind:

“‘There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,’ the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. ‘For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

Pilots have been reporting ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAPs) for decades. You can be sure that anyone allowed to fly the US military’s advanced, deadly and extremely expensive aircraft has passed a battery of psychological tests. Therefore, if such persons are reporting UAPs, then it’s entirely reasonable for the authorities to investigate – and for the mainstream media to cover the issue.

Suggested reading

What an octopus can teach us about being human

By Tom Chivers

It’s important that we don’t lose our appetite for the unexplained. It’s true that the field has been colonised by every kind of crackpot and conspiracy theorist, thus putting off respectable researchers. But in a world subject to evermore extensive scientific observation, anything we discover in the future is going to be increasingly elusive and/or weird. Breaking genuinely new ground in science (as opposed to finding out more and more about less and less) depends on our continued willingness to venture into uncharted territory.

By way of illustration, here’s a story from 1920s France: it concerns my great-grandmother Alice, who died before I was born, but whom I’m told was a sober and sensible sort.

One afternoon, Alice was in her kitchen when she heard thunder. Not being fond of stormy weather, she went to close the window. It was then that she saw what she described as a “ball of fire” drift over the garden wall. About the size of a football and shining brightly, it was levitating off the ground and moving at speed towards her. Fortunately, it hit an apple tree first – upon which it exploded into nothingness.

There were no other witnesses and no evidence, other than a scorched tree. Alice could offer no explanation for what she’d seen; and, other than telling her family about it, she sought no attention. It was, of course, several decades before the start of the UFO craze.

What she experienced, however, does have a likely explanation – the unusual but Earthly phenomenon of ball lightning. Being rare and unpredictable, it is still not well understood, but it has been scientifically documented – and various theories about it have been proposed.

Before the 1960s, however, scientists were highly sceptical – dismissing witness reports spanning centuries. If, in the 1920s, my great-grandmother had pursued the matter, her experience would have been filed away under the heading of ‘paranormal’ and given no credence.

So I’m glad the US Navy are paying attention to the strange stuff their pilots see. It doesn’t mean that little green men are behind it all – or even the Russians. But if they do find an explanation, it’s bound to be an interesting one.

Suggested reading

Nasa's greatest gamble

By Gerard DeGroot

The principle of new things getting weirder over time makes a lot of sense. For instance, one often sees plane crashes and other disasters described as ‘freak accidents’. That’s not just cliched language, but a recognition that, having eliminated routine mishaps through extensive modern safety measures, anything that still goes wrong is, by definition, unusual and unanticipated.

It’s the same with scientific understanding. We’ve documented and explained almost everything in plain sight, and thus what we’ve yet to pin down isn’t going to be obvious at all. Which means that despite the internet-enabled proliferation of nonsense, we must nevertheless keep an open mind and expect the unexpected.

“From the crew of Apollo 8”, Borman ended, “we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good earth.” When asked on his return whether the moon was made of green cheese, Anders replied “No, it’s made of American cheese.”

“That was probably the most magical Christmas Eve I’ve ever experienced,” Gene Kranz, the Apollo Flight Director, recalled. “It was literally magic. It made you prickly. You could feel the hairs on your arms rising.”

For Americans, it was a glorious end to a terrible year of assassinations, riots and war. One woman wrote to Nasa: “Thank you for saving 1968.” Time made the three astronauts its Men of the Year. “The voyage of Apollo 8”, wrote the Washington Post in its roundup of the year, “did more than any single event … to restore man’s faith in himself.”

Apollo 8 was originally supposed to test the complete lunar package in earth orbit, but the lunar module was not yet ready. Rather than delay the mission, Nasa decided to send the command and service modules to the moon, to test the worthiness of the craft for the long voyage.

Suggested reading

Mission to make money: a new space race is taking off

By Nigel Cameron

When the navigation numbers were crunched, it was discovered that the orbit would begin on Christmas Eve. Nasa, always obsessed with publicity, could not believe its luck. Going ahead was nevertheless foolhardy. The veteran astronaut Alan Shepard later claimed that it was “the single greatest gamble in space flight then, and since”. Crucial systems were not remotely ready. “Shit, we didn’t even have the software to fly Apollo in Earth orbit, much less to the Moon”, Deke Slayton, another astronaut, claimed. In the race to the moon, however, risks seemed worthwhile.

Nasa still feared the Soviets might get there first, for good reason. On 8 December, 1968, the Russian cosmonaut Pavel Belyayev was waiting on the launch pad at Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan. His itinerary was to go to the moon, circle it, and come back – just like Apollo 8. Four hours before the scheduled launch, however, he was removed from the Zond 7 capsule when problems developed with the rocket. After a long inspection, Russian officials decided to make the mission unmanned. The rocket blasted off, reached 27 miles and then exploded. NASA enjoyed an early Christmas.

“What is it you want, Mary?”, George Bailey asks his sweetheart in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. “You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it … I’ll give you the moon, Mary.”  That bright white orb had always been the stuff of romance. Apollo 8, however, threw a big bucket of cold water over that nonsense. “We don’t know if you can see this on the TV screen,” Anders reported, “but the moon is nothing but a milky waste. Completely void.” Borman then added: “it’s a – a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing … It makes you realize what you have back there on earth.”

The first manned mission to the moon revealed what everyone already knew, but few were prepared to admit: there’s nothing very special about it. C. S. Lewis, musing on what Apollo would mean, predicted that

“The moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers – will have been taken from us forever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of our emotional wealth, will have gone. … he who first reaches [the moon] steals something from us all.”

The moon’s romance had always been a figment of the imagination, but a rather lovely one. The same could be said for space travel in general. Space is cold, forbidding, rather boring and deadly. Its beauty and attraction are figments of the imagination.

That Christmas flight proved that the Americans would win the race to the moon. But did that race have any meaning? It was not about advancing science, nor was it really about the moon itself. If the moon had real value, there’d have been a war over it by now.

Its importance lay only as an arbitrary symbol of supremacy in the Cold War. John Kennedy, who first announced the moon mission on 25 May 1961, recognised as much. In a brief moment of candour, he once asked: “Don’t you think I would rather spend these billions on programs here at home, such as health and education and welfare? But in this matter we have no choice. The Nation’s prestige is too heavily involved.”

On another occasion, he told his cabinet: “I’m not that interested in space. … We’ve wrecked our budget … and the only justification for it … [is] getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians.”

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Peter Franklin

The shallowness of the space race rendered it difficult to assign meaning to Apollo 8. Some tried to turn the mission into a defining moment, a watershed in the human story. “This is the last day of the old world,” Arthur C. Clarke remarked. “If there is an ultimate truth to be learned from this historic flight,” President Lyndon Johnson surmised, “it may be this: There are few social or scientific or political problems which cannot be solved by men, if they truly want to solve them together.” At times like this, Americans seem to like tripe.

The poet Archibald Macleish desperately tried to give the event sacred meaning: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, those brothers were killing one another with ever increasing ferocity in wars, riots and random murders. Much as astrologists like to think that the moon affects our behaviour, this was one instance when it clearly did not.

Suggested reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

So what did it all mean? The Apollo 8 astronauts travelled to the moon and discovered the earth. “The vast loneliness of the moon … makes you realize just what you have back there on earth,” Lovell remarked. All that effort and money on the space programme had shown that it was actually the earth that was special.

That was the message behind those spectacular pictures of Earthrise taken by the crew. Compared to the desolation of the Moon, the earth was an exquisite pearl floating in vast emptiness. The environmental lobby loved the photos even if it condemned the wasteful industry that had produced them. “Earthrise” was used on countless posters encouraging people to respect their planet. Some ecologists even began to speak of “Spaceship Earth”.

In other words, Apollo 8 qualified as the most expensive trip to a viewpoint ever undertaken. It did not change us. It did not solve our problems. It did not enhance the brotherhood of man. It simply showed us the earth, in all its vulnerable beauty. Shoving aside all the romantic tosh, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

However, they weren’t the first Earthlings to go extraterrestrial – that honour belongs not to mankind, but to tortoise-kind. On 18 September 1968, two tortoises, some flies and various other creepy-crawlies were launched into space aboard the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 mission – the first spacecraft to circle the moon and come back home again.

If life has evolved nowhere else in the universe, then that means the history of extraterrestrial life is a mere 50 years old – beginning with a couple of commie tortoises and their invertebrate fellow travellers.

Further reading

Mission to make money: a new space race is taking off

By Nigel Cameron

But how likely is it that life is unique to Earth? Not very, one might think. The universe is a big place – and one in which planets not unlike our own are thick as blackberries.

We don’t know how life first arose. We’ve yet to replicate the process in a laboratory. Yet, it must be possible, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We also have evidence, albeit patchy, that the evolution of intelligence is possible. So, given the mind-boggling number of opportunities for it to happen elsewhere, it would seem exceedingly unlikely that we’re alone.

But how do we calculate the odds? In a fascinating piece for Vox, Liv Boeree writes about the main statistical tool at our disposal – the Drake Equation:

“In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed a formula that multiplied seven ‘parameters’ together to estimate N, the number of detectable civilizations we should expect within our galaxy at a given moment in time.”

Even if you put in some very low figures for parameters like the fraction of planets that develop life, the chance of that life getting civilised, and the proportion of civilisations that send signals into space, the fact that key multipliers – like the number of planets – are so high should mean a universe positively cluttered with evidence of alien life.

Yet when we looked, we found nothing:

“In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicist Enrico Fermi famously exclaimed to his colleagues over lunch: ‘Where is everybody?’

“He had been pondering the surprising lack of evidence of other life outside of our planet. In a universe that had been around for some 14 billion years, and in that time developed more than a billion trillion stars, Fermi reasoned there simply must be other intelligent civilizations out there.”

Now, 68 years later, and despite numerous advances in astronomy and spaceflight, we’ve still got nothing.

Hence the Fermi Paradox – which juxtaposes what the Drake Equation would suggest is out there and the continuing lack of evidence that anything is.

Is the Drake Equation misleading us?

“…the Drake equation is ultimately vulnerable to the optimism or pessimism of whoever wields it. And this is reflected in previous scientific papers whose results give values of N ranging anywhere from 10 to many billions.

“As astronomer and SETI co-founder Jill Tarter eloquently put it in an interview with National Geographic in 2000: ‘The Drake Equation is a wonderful way to organize our ignorance.’”

Boeree writes about a recent update to the equation. This uses ‘Bayesian logic’ – a statistical method for revising estimated probabilities on the basis of subsequent observations. Along with another statistical tweak, the researchers used the Bayesian update to recalculate the probabilities:

“This two-stage process produced striking results: Based upon the current state of astrobiological knowledge, there’s a 53 to 99.6 percent chance we are the only civilization in this galaxy and a 39 to 85 percent chance we are the only one in the observable universe.”

Of course, this revised method is itself a “wonderful way to organise our ignorance” – albeit in a more sophisticated manner.

Nevertheless, the underlying Bayesian principle is a sound one – the longer and harder we look for evidence without finding it, the greater the likelihood that intelligent alien life is either freakishly rare or that we’re alone in the universe. 

In my view, proof of humanity’s unique status would be of infinitely greater importance than the discovery an alien civilisation. Indeed, it would be the most important scientific discovery ever made – one demanding an explanation that a lot of people wouldn’t like.

Still, at least they could comfort themselves with the thought that a tortoise won the space race. Aesop would be proud.

Further listening

Test article

By Charlotte Pickles, Nigel Cameron and Peter Franklin

This isn’t sci fi. Nor a visionary effort on the fringes of the economy. Hard-nosed commercial enterprises – as well as some forward-thinking governments – are already lining up to reap the potentially vast rewards the space age goldrush promises.

In the past few weeks, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has talked about the moon serving as a filling station for rockets to deep space. Defence contractor Northrop Grumman’s innovation blog has enthused about new space sources for platinum and palladium. And Washington’s political newspaper, The Hill, has glowingly reported two current asteroid missions.[1.   Mark R. Whittington, “Two asteroid missions will help shape the economy of the 21st century,” The Hill, April 7, 2018.]

Most telling of all, investment banker Goldman Sachs has joined the chorus with a game-changing report. It concludes: while the “psychological barriers” to asteroid mining are high, the “actual financial and technological barriers are far lower”. Probes can be built for tens of millions. An asteroid-grabbing spaceship for $2.6 billion. That really is not a lot of money in Silicon Valley.[1.  Jim Edwards, “Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is ‘more realistic than perceived’,” April 6, 2017. The full report is apparently private to Goldman Sachs clients, but portions are quoted here and elsewhere.]

Economics at work

Two fundamental economic factors are driving this interest.

First, the so-called “rare earth” minerals which are so vital to digital devices, are hard to get. They are mostly not as “rare” as their name suggests. But they are not abundant and they are costly to extract. Most are mined in China, some in Russia, and their supply has become a national security issue for the United States. They are central to the digital economy.

Second, there has been a huge shift in the cost of getting into space. In the mid-20th-century only the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union could afford it. The costs of the Apollo moonshot were enormous: at its height, in the late 60s, it consumed almost 5% of the entire U.S. federal budget.

Now, according to Business Insider:

The price of spacecraft is plummeting, thanks to reusable rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. It used to cost $35 million (£28 million) to send one person up on a Soyuz rocket. Today, Virgin Galactic hopes to get space tourists into space for something like $250,000 (£200,000), Goldman says.

Moreover, it isn’t just the metals on asteroids that have high value. There’s also the water. This as Scientific American notes, can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen – rocket fuel. That’s rocket fuel that would not need to be blasted into space from earth.

Suggested reading

Why we need a moratorium on manned spaceflight

By Peter Franklin

Space Law

As things stand, there are only a couple of explicit restraints on what nations can do up amid the stars. With the Antarctic Treaty as a guide, UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 declares space to be the common property of all nations. It cannot be “colonized,” or used for military purposes.[3.  The Outer Space Treaty is a truly visionary document; it is hard to see such a consensus arising now for an instrument that placed huge restraints on what nations could do in space. Back then, of course, only the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were serious contenders.  This UN website helpfully also gives related bunding and non-binding space agreements: “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.”]

Inevitably, countries are already arguing over whether mining is banned under the Outer Space Treaty. Russia and Brazil claim it is. While there’s no specific reference to mining, they claim it’s prohibited by the ban on seizing territory.

Two other countries, the US and Luxembourg (wealth European mini-state; pop: 500,000), have taken the initiative to provide a legal framework for space mining. Luxembourg, for one, has high hopes of becoming a major player.

According to Etienne Schneider, Deputy Prime Minister:

“Our goal is to put into place an overall framework for the exploration and commercial use of resources from ‘celestial bodies’ such as asteroids, or from the moon.”

Their plan to become the “Silicon Valley of asteroid mining” seems to be working.

Asteroid Missions

Interestingly, it’s the public money that has taken the lead in this particular space race. Rather than waiting for any rulings on asteroid ownership, the United States and Japan have launched experimental missions to asteroids and are expected rendezvous with their targets in a few weeks. Both are experimental missions to find out more about their asteroid’s composition and the viability of recovering material.

The NASA mission, OSIRIS-REx, will arrive at an asteroid called Bennu, currently orbiting the sun about 460 million miles away, in August. According to Asterank, a site that ranks the value of asteroids, there’s $870 billion of minerals to be found there. The probe will make a remote sensing campaign of these, grab some surface materials, and then wait til 2021 to head back to earth with its cargo.

Suggested reading

Who will win space?

By Nigel Cameron

The Japanese Hayabusa2 is expected to arrive at an asteroid called Ryugu, a rare type of asteroid that contains both volatile material and water-bearing materials, in June 2018. The probe will examine Ryugu remotely and collect a sample before departing in December 2019. Hayabusa2 will arrive back on Earth before the Americans, in December 2020.

Meanwhile, the private companies are still testing their kit. According to Space.com, Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-6 Satellite just “aced” its first big trial. Launched on an Indian rocket, it is now sitting in orbit waiting for the company’s next effort: the Arkyd-300 that will prospect asteroids. A whole group of Arkyd-300s will launch on a single rocket as early as 2020 – and fan out for separate asteroid targets. And the companies know their onions. Chris Lewecki, for example, CEO of Planetary resources, directed two Mars missions for NASA.

The Arkyd-301s will also carry piggyback miniprobes, which will deploy from their motherships and burrow into their target asteroid to get an even closer look at the space rocks.

Star Wars IX

According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the effervescent TV astronomer: “There’s this vast universe of limitless energy and limitless resources. I look at wars fought over access to resources. That could be a thing of the past, once space becomes our backyard.”

But in gushing about all the resources up there, Tyson makes a fundamental mistake. He assumes we would all be nice to each other if we had enough resources to go around. He forgets – or didn’t realise in the first place – that wars fought for access to resources have been as much about denying them to an enemy as seeking them for ourselves.

Given that China has been tightening its near-monopoly control of rare-earth mineral mining, how would it respond to a sudden huge increase in supply? As Business Insider drily notes, “Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum, with a single 500-meter-wide asteroid containing nearly 175X the global output, according to MIT….”

And what if that happened with gold? Gold’s scarcity is central to the global economy.

If access to these vast new resources is to come without conflict, there will need to be an unusually high level of terrestrial agreement. Wars have been started for a lot less than access to the $700 quintillion Psyche 16.

More by Nigel Cameron

Slaying dragons: Britain's national religion, the NHS

By Nigel Cameron

It’ll be an occasion to look back, but also forward to the future of manned spaceflight.

There’ll be talk of a new dawn for space exploration. Expect particular reference to private companies, such as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and XCOR, competing to pioneer space tourism.

There’ll also be some wild speculation about the race to get to Mars.

In a sobering essay for Quillette, Philip Backman exposes the whole enterprise to the hard vacuum of reality.

Let’s start with this space tourism business, where almost all of the progress made so far has been in regard to sub-orbital as opposed to orbital flight:

“Many may not be aware of the mighty gulf that exists between sub-orbital and orbital flight. To the uninitiated they seem very similar; a suborbital ride is over quickly but both make it to space. A closer look, however, reveals the shocking difference. Suborbital vehicles reach a speed near one kilometers per second at the time of rocket engine shut down, and because of this, they remain in space for only minutes. For low altitude orbital flight, at that same point, speed is only slightly shy of eight kilometers per second.”

And that’s not all – Backman explains that because the ‘energy of motion’ is proportional to the square of velocity, “suborbital spacecrafts can only achieve a paltry one to three percent of the kinetic energy acquired by other similar sized vehicles propelled into a continuous circular orbit”.

It’ll certainly take a ‘giant leap’ before we commercialise proper manned spaceflight.

But what about Elon Musk and his SpaceX initiative? The Falcon Heavy rocket – a partially reusable orbital launch system – had a very successful maiden flight only last month. As pictured on every front page in the world, its payload was a Tesla Roadster (another one of Elon Musk’s groundbreaking products) – with a dummy astronaut as its ‘driver’. All brilliant stuff – and brilliant PR – but, as the cynics point out, NASA put a car on the moon in 1971 together with some real astronauts to drive it.

The Roadster is on a trajectory to Mars, symbolising Musk’s ultimate ambition to colonise the red planet. But what would be the point of that? Contrary to what you may have heard, our own planet has plenty of uninhabited space – vast swathes of territory with no permanent residents. Here, I don’t even mean Antarctica, but countries such as Australia and Canada – or even Spain (Monday’s UnPacked features research showing that only 13% of the square kilometres that comprise Spanish territory are inhabited).

One might object that these places are just too cold or hot or arid or or remote for anyone to want to live there. But compared with Mars or anywhere else off-planet they’re paradise – and, furthermore, infinitely easier to get too. Even if we screwed up our planet through climate change, it’d still be preferable to the rest of the solar system, which is a dump quite frankly.

There’s a lot of space-based science to be done of course; but very little of it requires scientists in situ. The big exception is the study of the effect of space travel on the human body – a wonderfully circular justification for manned space flight.

It’s already the case that machines – i.e. satellites – are doing most of the science that can be done in space (and also making all of the money to made there). With ongoing advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, it should be obvious that unmanned systems are the only rational way to explore and develop the ‘high frontier.’

Unfortunately, reason doesn’t always come to the fore in these matters. Referring to dead-end programs such as the Space Shuttle, Backman exposes the weird effect that manned spaceflight has on the political mind:

“I can’t help but get the impression – I’m sure others have – that these post Apollo programs have survived, not on their own merits, but as enterprises carried forth by the momentum of Apollo and an overwhelming nostalgia for the greatness that once was. Apollo was such a striking visual symbol of American greatness that to completely end human spaceflight would be tantamount to declaring a deliberate retreat from greatness to the world. Enough people advocate for the illusion, and so it continues.”

Could the same zombie momentum propel us to Mars (or at least cause us to waste billions of dollars in the attempt)? There’s a real danger it might – especially if it turns into a race between nations to get there first.

Only last week Donald Trump said the US would be going to Mars “very soon”.

Here’s a different idea: the nations of the world should sit down and agree an indefinite moratorium on manned spaceflight – and let their robots scramble for the stars instead.

China pushes ahead, as the U.S. goes back

Under the provocative title “China is winning the 21^st century space race” Fortune magazine set out what we know about Beijing’s extraterrestrial intentions. Mr. Xi’s ambitions lie far beyond dominating the South China Sea.[1.  Vikram Mansharamani, Fortune, March 31, 2016: “China is winning the 21^st century space race.”]

While we are never quite sure of China’s budgets, the World Economic Forum estimated that in 2013 spending on space was just over $6 billion (against $39 billion for the United States). That was enough to put China second in the global league table: just ahead of Russia ($5 billion) and far ahead of other countries (the UK’s figure was a miserly $367 million).

Yes, far behind the United States. But two facts need to be remembered. First, developing nations are often much better at getting value for money. India’s remarkable 2014 trip to Mars came in at around one-tenth of what it would have cost the U.S. to do the same thing.[2.  For a “staggeringly cheap” $74m. Here is the BBC report. ]

Second, note the trajectory. China’s spending is going up: and (unlike the U.S., where space policy flips with administrations) they have a long-term plan.

Here are some more facts that should worry the west.

• The International Space Station, which has so far cost $150 billion, will be shutting up shop in the early 2020s. Meanwhile, China has been building its own. Already it has astronauts there. It will be fully operational by 2022. Meanwhile, Congress has banned the U.S. from working with China, so will be excluded from any participation.
• “In 2013, China became the third nation—after the United States and the Soviet Union—to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. In 2014, the country also sent a probe around the moon and back, the first such mission since the 1970s.”
• In 2019 China plans to send a probe to land on the far side of the Moon (a first), and bring back rock samples.
• And then send astronauts.
• And then, to Mars. Initially, an unmanned rover, in 2020, 40 years after the U.S. Viking probe. And then, people.

China has an eye firmly fixed on the future. Hegemony in space is integral to its plan to supplant the United States as the world’s superpower.

For the United States – back to the future

Back in the mid-20^th century past, before the digital revolution deluged us with computing power and mobile devices, the west lived through something that looked like the future at the time, and still looks like it.

The hottest thing in air travel was a supersonic plane called Concorde. We were all watching the Jetsons. And close to 60 years ago a U.S. President promised us a man on the Moon.

The Space Race, kicked off by Soviet Russia with the launch of Sputnik, became an overwhelming American priority. For a decade, politicians of both parties kept faith with President Kennedy’s vision. At one point close to 5% of the entire U.S. federal budget was spent on NASA. The current equivalent figure is closer to one-half a percent.

A man was duly delivered to the Moon a year ahead of schedule. (Personal disclosure: one of the joys of my life was to have shaken the hand of Neil Armstrong. And also discovered that we shared a birthday!)

Then, more than 40 years ago, America just lost interest.

With the Soviets left in the dust, JFK’s promise fulfilled, and fresh demands on budgets (like Vietnam), the vision lapsed. There would be no more men, or women, on the Moon after Apollo 17’s landing in 1972. And the Space Shuttle programme (Plan B), intended to be a low-cost effort, proved a disaster – both for the accountants and, of course, tragically for two of the crews.

After the Shuttle programme ended, even sending Americans to the International Space Station – a collaboration with other nations, famous mainly for Commander Chris Hadfield’s performance of David Bowie’s Ground Control to Major Tom – involved the ultimate humiliation of hitching a ride from the Russians.

As some wag suggested, this sequence would make more sense in reverse. First, Americans get into earth orbit, but depend on other nations (aka, Russia) for lift. Then the U.S. develops its own lift in the form of the Space Shuttle. Finally, heavy lift is established and enables manned exploration of the Moon. A NASA version of Benjamin Button.[3.  Benjamin Button, the title of a 2008 feature film based on the book by Scott Fitzgerald, is the story of man who lives life in reverse; he keeps getting younger.] view comments]]> https://stage.unherd.com/2017/12/will-win-space/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://stage.unherd.com/2017/12/will-win-space/?edition=us/feed/ 9941