{"id":170967,"date":"2025-08-24T05:40:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T05:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/170967\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T05:40:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T05:40:14","slug":"living-on-mars-would-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/170967\/","title":{"rendered":"Living on Mars would suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

The billionaire owners of Space X and Blue Origin have competing visions of a space-based future. Elon Musk wants a self-sustaining settlement on Mars<\/a> as a backup for humanity in case the Earth gets destroyed. Jeff Bezos wants us to move heavy industry<\/a> and all polluting industries to space to save Earth\u2019s climate, and envisions a trillion humans living in space.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the United States and China are locked in a race of their own for dominance of space<\/a>, with Chinese advancements far outpacing America\u2019s. The nuclear-wielding superpowers could wind up competing over territory on the moon and Mars.<\/p>\n

Mars, for all its flaws<\/a> \u2014 and there are many, including radiation, dust storms, and unbreathable air \u2014 is the only planet in our solar system that\u2019s a candidate for settlement. Its day and night cycle closely resembles Earth\u2019s, its dramatic temperature swings are moderate compared to other planets, and it contains the basic building blocks of life.<\/p>\n

But the science journalist, author, and astrophysicist Adam Becker says it\u2019s just not worth it.<\/p>\n

His recent book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley\u2019s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity<\/a>, challenges the fashionable ideologies guiding tech leaders today, including long-termism, effective altruism, transhumanism, and space colonization.<\/p>\n

As Becker puts it, it\u2019s about \u201cthe horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they\u2019re trying to shove down our throats, and why they don\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Becker told Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram why he thinks Mars is worth exploring for scientific inquiry, but not as a Plan B for Earth.<\/p>\n

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There\u2019s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, you think Mars is a horrible idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mars is a horrible idea. Mars is a terrible place; it\u2019s awful. There\u2019s nothing to breathe. You\u2019ll die of cancer if you hang out there for too long because it\u2019s covered in radiation. The dirt is poisoned. The gravity\u2019s too low. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does. There\u2019s no biosphere. There\u2019s nothing to eat. There\u2019s nothing to breathe. If you hung out on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you would asphyxiate while the saliva boils off your tongue.<\/p>\n

But you\u2019re an astrophysicist, author, and journalist, which means at some point you were a young child who dreamt of space. And part of the dream of space is Mars, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I thought that the future was in space. I watched a lot of Star Trek because I\u2019m a huge nerd, and a young growing nerd needs to consume healthy amounts of Star Trek in order to grow up to be a big, strong nerd. When I was a kid, I thought of Star Trek as a documentary about the future. Not literally a documentary, but I thought, \u201cYeah, this is what we\u2019re shooting for; this is what we want. We want to be in space, that\u2019s where the good future is.\u201d And then I grew up.<\/p>\n

Notably, there weren\u2019t a lot of billionaires on <\/strong>Star Trek<\/strong>, or they didn\u2019t talk about it, at least. <\/strong><\/p>\n

No. In fact, what they talked about was that there was no money<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, you grow up, and you see the intersection of space and money, and you change your mind about how you feel about space? Or at least Mars.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love space. I did a PhD in astrophysics for a reason. I think that space research and exploring space with robots and satellites is amazing. But seeing billionaires turning space into another status icon for the ultra wealthy? It\u2019s gross.<\/p>\n

Musk talks about Mars as if it\u2019s the inevitable future of humanity, that going to Mars is a project to save humanity like some giant philanthropic effort, and it\u2019s just nonsense. He says we have to go to Mars<\/a> in case there\u2019s a disaster here on Earth, and we have to put a million people on Mars by 2050<\/a>, and they have to be able to survive even if the rockets from Earth<\/a> stop coming.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m like, dude, that is not happening. Mars is awful, and there is nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it a worse place than Mars. You could have an asteroid hit as bad as the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And the day that that happened, which is the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth, was a nicer day than any day on Mars in the last few billion years.<\/p>\n

What about the Bezos argument for space colonization? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I will say one nice thing about one billionaire: Jeff Bezos at one point made fun of Musk<\/a> for promoting Mars. He\u2019s like, Mars sucks. I\u2019m like, yeah, you know what? Jeff Bezos is right. Mars does suck. It\u2019s everything he said after that that was a problem. Because Bezos also has a specific vision for space. He says we need to go out into space to live in hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous space stations so we can have a trillion humans<\/a> living in space in a couple of centuries.<\/p>\n

And before you tell us what you think of that idea, we see a lot of this in the science fiction that we love to watch, from<\/strong> Star Trek<\/strong> to <\/strong>Interstellar<\/strong> to <\/strong>2001: A Space Odyssey<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely. But science fiction is fiction. It is a set of stories that we tell not to predict the future, but as a setting to explore some questions about being human. One of the great science fiction authors of all time, Ursula Le Guin, said that science fiction is not a guide to the future<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like any good millennial, there are tweets that live rent free in my head, and one of them is the Torment Nexus tweet<\/a>, where it says: Science fiction author: \u201cIn my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.\u201d Tech company: \u201cAt long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don\u2019t Create the Torment Nexus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should be focusing on actually making this world a better place. Mars is not hope. It\u2019s not even a fantasy. It\u2019s a delusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

I agree that science fiction can give us something to aspire to, but it\u2019s not the literal technology in the science fiction stories. Those things are narrative devices, like warp drive. We shouldn\u2019t aspire to warp drive because \u2014 just going to throw this out there as a physicist \u2014 that ain\u2019t happening.<\/p>\n

One of the things I love about Star Trek is it shows a future to aspire to in terms of how the people relate to each other and the kind of world that they\u2019ve built, independent of the technology. Star Trek was groundbreaking, even in the original series, in showing a diverse group of people on an aspirational mission of exploration and self-actualization, and working together as friends to explore the world that we live in. That is a future to aspire to.<\/p>\n

That is not what Bezos has in mind. Bezos\u2019s idea is to put a trillion people in space, and he says he wants this because if we stay here on Earth in a few centuries, we\u2019re going to run out of resources and run out of energy. And he\u2019s right about that. If you assume the current rate of constant growth in usage of energy, then a few centuries after that, you\u2019re using all of the energy output of the sun.<\/p>\n

But what you\u2019re saying is there\u2019s an alternative, and that is to not use all of our resources.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, or at least to safeguard them more wisely and use them in a more sustainable way. But Bezos wants perpetual growth in energy usage per capita. He\u2019s used that specific phrase. He wants each individual person to use more and more energy forever. And then he talks about how if we had a trillion people, there\u2019d be a thousand Mozarts<\/a> and a thousand Einsteins. What about the Mozarts and Einsteins that are living and dying in poverty right now?<\/p>\n

It sounds like, for all you disagree with these tech billionaires when it comes to Mars or space colonization, we all have to agree that <\/strong>life on Earth is not infinite<\/strong><\/a>. Our sun, the source of life here on Earth, will eventually die. I know it\u2019s very far away. But we made it to the moon, and making it to Mars feels like it could be a step in the right direction. <\/strong><\/p>\n

When I sat on the steps of the Air and Space Museum here in Washington, DC, and asked people whether we should go to Mars, they didn\u2019t talk about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They talked about the idea that space is infinite, and as a human race, it\u2019s something we should pursue. Do you really think that we should skip the stepping stone, just because these guys have some wrongheaded ideas about why we should be taking that step in the first place?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Mars sucks because the billionaires want to go there. I think Mars sucks and the billionaires want to go there. And why do they want to go there? Well, they\u2019re not particularly original guys. Mars has been in our cultural psyche<\/a> for a very long time, and so has the idea of sending the human race out into space.<\/p>\n

I think, instead, we should be focusing on actually making this world a better place. Mars is not hope. It\u2019s not even a fantasy. It\u2019s a delusion. It is not a place where we are going to find our fate, unless that fate is painful death.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t even see a reason to go there so that we can experiment with what it would be like to live on another planet long term? You don\u2019t even see a use for that because it might teach us something about the actual moonshot that we discover in a hundred or a thousand years, which is there\u2019s some planet in some distant galaxy that\u2019s just like home.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we find a planet around another star, even in our own galaxy, forget distant galaxies, that\u2019s just like home, we\u2019re not going. It\u2019s not happening. The speed-of-light limit is a hard stop. We are not going. And no one is coming to save us. I find that hopeful. We have to save ourselves.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a story that I think is apocryphal; toward the end of his life, somebody asked the great architect and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller<\/a> if he was sad that he was going to die without ever having gone to space. And his answer was, \u201cWe\u2019re in space.\u201d We live in space! And we live in the most special and amazing place in space.<\/p>\n

This is a place that we evolved to live, and everything about it is so well suited for us, and it\u2019s not just the distance of the planet from our sun. It\u2019s not just the mix of gases in our atmosphere. It is everything about this biosphere.<\/p>\n

We can eat the fruit off the trees. We live in a place where food literally grows on trees. It\u2019s awesome! This is an amazing place, and we should continue to learn about the universe that we are a part of as we build a better home for ourselves here where we belong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The billionaire owners of Space X and Blue Origin have competing visions of a space-based future. Elon Musk…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":170968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96981,5158,159,783,20644,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-170967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-explained-podcast","9":"tag-podcasts","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space","12":"tag-today","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115082141737575270","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}