Yves here. Lambert and I have regularly discussed how deranged the idea of trying to colonize Mars is (I will spare you our long list of particularly; you might have fun generating your own). This book usefully takes on these not-even-utopian, just crackpot, schemes for a better future.
On the plane back from NYC, due to failure to find something better, I wound up seeing a documentary about William Shatner that was actually engaging (apparently based on a long set of interviews with Shatner edited down to the best bits). In it, he gave his long form account of going up in Blue Origin (he was on the second trip with passengers). He said he was only one then to focus on looking out the window at Earth and space as opposed to getting off on the whoopie of zero G.
This is a separate interview but covers the same terrain, starting at 1:30:
By Dan Falk (@danfalk.bsky.social), a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include “The Science of Shakespeare” and “In Search of Time.” Originally published at Undark
Elon Musk once joked: “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a “back up” planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable.
Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 — and he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroidsto build giant space stations. “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he has said.
Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker. In “More Everything Forever,” Becker details a multitude of flaws in the grand designs espoused not only by Musk, Andreessen, and Bezos, but by Sam Altman, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and an array of tech billionaires and future-focused thinkers whose ambitions are transforming today’s world and shaping how we think about the centuries to come.
Becker targets not only their aspirations for outer space, but also their claims about artificial intelligence, the need for endless growth, their ambitions for eradicating aging and death, and more — as suggested by the book’s subtitle: “AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.”
Becker finds the idea of colonizing Mars easy to deflate, explaining that dying may in fact be the only thing that humans are likely to do there. “The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison,” he bluntly puts it. He notes that we have a hard time convincing people to spend any great length of time in Antarctica — a far more hospitable place. “Mars,” Becker says, “would make Antarctica look like Tahiti.”
The solar system’s other planets (and moons) are equally unwelcoming, and star systems beyond our own solar system are unimaginably distant. He concludes: “Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities — not now, not soon, and maybe not ever.”
Becker sees space colonization as not only unrealistic but also morally dubious. Why, he asks, are the billionaires so keen on leaving our planet as opposed to taking care of it? He interviews the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, who sees their focus on killer asteroids and rogue AIs —and their seeming disinterest in climate change — as an evasion of responsibility. “The idea of backing up humanity is about getting out of responsibility by making it seem that we have this Get Out of Jail Free card,” Walkowicz says.
Becker targets not only tech gurus but also so-called longtermists (who prioritize the flourishing of humans who will live eons from now), rationalists (who believe decision-making should be guided by reason and logic), and transhumanists (who hold a variety of beliefs related to extending human life spans and merging humanity with AI). These groups perceive the future in a multitude of ways, but underlying many of their visions is what Becker sees as a misplaced faith in artificial intelligence, sometimes imagined to be on the verge of blossoming into “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) but also potentially perilous if its goals diverge from those of humanity (the so-called alignment problem).
Not everyone shares this fear of AI running amok, and Becker makes a point of speaking with skeptics such as Jaron Lanier, Melanie Mitchell, and Yann LeCun, all of whom are far from convinced that this is a real danger. He also cites the entrepreneur and web developer Maciej Cegłowski, who has described the unaligned superintelligent AI alignment problem as “the idea that eats smart people.” Still, the book is not mere AI-guru-bashing on Becker’s part: He spells out what it is these devotees believe, before presenting a more skeptical alternative view.
Becker also notes that computer power may not be destined to increase as quickly as many proponents imagine. He scrutinizes Moore’s law, the notion that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years, noting that this growth will inevitably come up against limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Becker points out that Gordon Moore himself estimated in 2010 that the current rate of exponential growth would come to an end in 10 or 20 years — in other words, now or very soon.
As Becker sees it, faith in Moore’s law is just one facet of a poorly thought-out commitment to endless growth that some technophiles seem to be advocating. Exponential growth, in particular, is by definition not sustainable. He cites an analogy that inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has made about the growth of lily pads in a pond: Every few days, the number of pads will have doubled, and before you know it they’ve covered the whole pond. “That’s true,” Becker writes, “but that’s also where the lily pads’ growth ends, because they can’t cover more than 100 percent of the pond. Every exponential trend works like this. All resources are finite; nothing lasts forever; everything has limits.”
Becker says that if we keep using energy at our current (and accelerating) rate, we’ll be exploiting the full energy output of the sun in 1,350 years, and a bit more than a millennium later, all the energy emitted by all the stars in the Milky Way — and so on.
Becker also takes issue with the idea at the core of longtermism — that the needs of countless billions or even trillions of future humans are as important as the needs of those alive on Earth today — and perhaps more important, because of their (eventual) vast numbers. (Many of these ideas are spelled out in philosopher William MacAskill’s 2022 book, “What We Owe the Future.”)
For the longtermists, our actions today ought to be focused on allowing this bountiful future to unfold, even if it means sacrifices in the here-and-now. The problem, writes Becker, is that we just can’t know what conditions will prevail centuries from now, let alone millennia, so it’s presumptuous to imagine that today’s decisions can be tailored to benefit people who won’t be born for an unfathomably long time.
Becker finds longtermist thinking wanting not only in logic but in ethics. He points to philosopher and AI researcher Nick Beckstead’s influential 2013 doctoral thesis, which argued that saving lives of people in rich countries likely has more of a ripple effect than saving lives of people in poor countries, who are less able to implement change. Becker sums up the argument: “In other words: the lives of people living in, say, Mozambique matter less than the lives of people living in the United States, according to Beckstead, because the people in the United States will contribute more to the glorious longtermist future in space.”
Becker finds other examples of such problematic thinking. He notes that many in the rationalist community appear to support the idea of “human biodiversity,” which asserts that people of different races have differing abilities, and that those differences are rooted in genetics. Becker correctly labels this as pseudoscience and as warmed-over White supremacy.
He is also concerned with the degree to which some AI researchers focus on “intelligence.” Becker interviews computer scientist Timnit Gebru, who suggests this obsession with intelligence as the be-all and end-all of AI research, leading to some imagined race of superior beings, smacks of eugenics. Becker adds: “None of this is surprising — it’s sad and horrifying, but predictable. The tech industry is rife with racism.”
Becker is not a luddite, nor is he anti-tech. But he’s skeptical that humanity’s most urgent need is to populate the galaxy at any cost, and cautions against yielding control of our destiny to a race of AI overlords. He’d also like to see ordinary people be given a voice, instead of leaving so much decision-making to the billionaires.
Becker’s sobering book provides a welcome alternative perspective on the technologies that are changing our world at breakneck speed, and, especially, on the people who control those technologies. At the very least, it should encourage us to think more carefully about the kind of future we really want. As Becker sees it, although technology has improved our lives in countless ways, it is not a magic solution to humanity’s ills — and neither is the idea of escaping to the stars. Instead, we need to look after one another on the only planet we’re able to call home. “We aren’t leaving Earth,” he writes. “But we already live among the stars.”
That “appear to support” seems rather vague. Could it be that not only techie futurists are fond of straw men? And could it be that those cold and unfeeling billionaires get many of their ideas from good humanists like Christopher Nolan in Interstellar? Some have even suggested that sci fi is the new religion and one not only taken up by Silicon Valley. After all Tesla in the beginning was applauded as a tech response to the Green agenda out to save this planet.
In any case here’s suggesting that the overactive imaginations of tech billionaires are not leading us anywhere other than new stock market bubbles. And also one suggests that the peril of the planet comes down to all of us including the article’s praised ordinary people. We are all consuming said planet’s resources. Accepting this inconvenient truth is what we need rationality for.
Then to be truly consistent, those techie futurists should do all they can in every possible way to give the priority to African populations.
After all, scientific studies have shown that genetic diversity is significantly higher in Africa than in any other region of the world — to the extent that genetic differences within Africa are greater than between Africa and Europe, or Africa and Asia.
I am pretty sure that sacrificing Western (in the wide sense) populations because of the much richer African genetic pool — guarantee of a more solid survival and evolutive future in a longtermist perspective — is not what the techie futurists have in mind though.
A thought-experiment to put this deeply ignorant, unscientific obsession with Martian colonization in perspective is to seriously ask the the question: If humanity had to move elsewhere in the Solar System, what is the most habitable, Earthlike body, so the race might continue if we sent enough people there?
It’s not Mars.
Mars is the nearest planet, certainly. But long ago, when it lost its magnetosphere, almost all its carbon dioxide atmosphere (a hundred times thinner than Earth’s oxygen and nitrogen one) was stripped away by the solar wind and it’s too small to have enough gravity to ever retain sufficient atmosphere if we tried terraforming it. (Sorry Kim Stanley Robinson!) So Mars’s surface has only slightly lower levels of cosmic and solar radiation than interplanetary space — at best, radiation levels may be as low as that experienced on the ISS, which is within Earth’s magnetosphere but where the Kelly twin, Scott, on the station in NASA’s twins study —
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/twins-study/
— could nonetheless close his eyes and see flashes of light behind his closed eyelids from cosmic radiation—high-energy particles from space— hitting his optic nerves.
Any human beings who remained out on the Martian surface rather than beneath it would die within months. This doesn’t even get into the question of Musk’s Starship being a chemical rocket that would take nine months to reach the planet, by which time almost everyone aboard could already be dead or dying from cancers incurred by exposure to cosmic radiation; nuclear rockets are needed to go to Mars and could do the trip in seven weeks or less.
So, if not Mars, where? Interestingly, out of everywhere in the Solar System, Titan, Saturn’s moon, is the most plausible site for a human colony.
You may say: “Titan? Unless there’s some new discovery I don’t know about, Titan is ammonia-rich water ice around a rocky core, with a nitrogen-methane atmosphere and a surface three-hundred degrees fahrenheit below zero. A frozen poison ball, basically.”
True enough.
But given Titan’s atmosphere, you could walk on its surface without a pressurized spacesuit, though you’d certainly need one that was heated. Then, its orbit lies almost entirely inside Saturn’s magnetosphere, so it’s protected from radiation. Finally, the methane cycle there resembles Earth’s water cycle so it has a climate and weather, including wind and rain, which creates surface features like Earth’s, such as dunes, rivers, lakes, and seas.
Although as Titan’s seas and lakes are liquid methane and ethane, the rain there is essentially gasoline rain. Still, Titan is the most plausible site for a colony beyond Earth.
I wonder what would be the price of gasoline on Titan, if USA were to colonize it.
Afghanistan can serve as an indicator…
How’s the fishin’?
How’s the fishin’?
Depends which of Titan’s oceans you expect to find it in.
Gravitational measurements indicate a second ocean of liquid water fifty kilometers inside Titan, where a native biology could have evolved.
For biology as we think of biology, anyway. As far as theoretical exobiology, maybe someone in the NC commentariat knows more than I do. But organic life is customarily expected to be based on — to require — long chain molecules like the carbon-based ones we’re made of, or, alternatively, silicon-based ones, another possibility theorized about. Given that: –
[1.] I don’t know what long chain molecules, if any, would develop in an ocean of liquid methane and ethane like Kraken Mare, the main surface ocean on Titan.
[2.] And anyway a median temperature of —290 °F probably means that anything that happens there chemically is just too slow to eventuate in any type of biochemistry. Or so it seems to me.
However, that second water ocean inside Titan is supposedly another story. Anyway, a lot of folks like to hypothesize about life there.
Personally, I think it’s unlikely, because [2] would apply there, too. In other words, if Titan had a molten core like Earth’s to warm that interior water ocean, sure, life in it would be more possible. But again, those gravity measurements suggest its interior isn’t fully differentiated, so its rock and ice are mixed, rather than forming distinct layers like Earth’s mantle and core. And it’s all cold, cold, cold.
Pikers go to Mars, the big money goes to Titan. I read this interesting book on the subject a few years ago – Beyond Earth. They make a halfway decent scientific argument while handwaving away many legitimate and foreseeable problems (do NOT light a match on the surface of Titan). But beware – the book devolves into a bunch of libertarian claptrap about how a Titanic society would be constructed, which is pretty much par for the course for these types of “big thinkers”.
Also, Andreessen, with his prediction of 50 million future Urthlings, might be mistaking our pale blue dot for Trantor. It’s been a while since I read Foundation, but if I recall correctly, despoiling your planet, removing all the natural elements, and covering the entire planetary surface with metal in order to support tens of billions of people worked out great until it didn’t.
And this Beckstead fellow doesn’t seem to have thought out his arguments very well either. I would argue that it’s all this technological “progress” which has put the entire planet in danger of ecological disaster, so perhaps helping those less able to implement change is exactly the way to go. Maybe we should be weeding out the overly ambitious at this point in history, and trying for a more stable society with less technological change, at least until we as a species develop the wisdom to implement it wisely. And pace Plato’s bloviating on the topic, good luck finding the philosopher-monarch able to to that.
A final thought – as a wise man (Holy Shatner!) once said, in the long run, nothing really matters anyway ;)
Mars is a very damaged planet.
A few more knocks and it joins Apollo/Abel as a scattering of rocks all over its orbital path.
When the Romans ruled, their Calendar year was 10 months, 304 days.
After the Birth of Venus/Fall of Lucifer, they added two months: Julius and Augustus.
Decem means ten in Latin.
Trillions of humans, hmm… Not with the current Total Fertility Rate, that is dropping.
I have quite a few young colleagues, in their prime reproductive age, that have no intention of having kids…
Well there was that book that came out a coupla years ago called “One Billion Americans” that called for the US to increase its population to this size ‘in order to counterbalance China and be “the greatest nation on Earth”.’ Blogger Noah Smith thought this a fine idea-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans
Myself, I reckon that it would make all of America look like Detroit at its worse.
There would be some Elyssiums here and there. I think Margaret Attwood sketched a good portrait in her trilogy MaddAdam.
She definitely nailed the surge in feral hogs.
My plan is for an Earth where everyone has enough and no one takes too much. How’s that for a fantasy?
That’s a good one, we should replace all the tech overlord billionaires with you.
William Shatner has a nice ranch here in Tiny Town, and if you lived here in the 80’s and 90’s*, you’d probably see him in town, but he’s seldom seen these days. His ranch foreman threw an annual big bring your own everything party at his ranch which attracted 10% of the town’s population and we went a number of times, hoping to meet him, but no dice.
I had planned to hit him with a TJ Hooker question and then segue into Star Trek…
* the best Shatner story had him on his powerboat when a swimmer drifted too far from shore and got stuck on one of the occasional small islands in the middle of the Kaweah River, and he saved the marooned one, now imagine Capt Kirk coming to your rescue?
Rocket Man, performed by William Shatner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co2ZVdVM26E
I wrote this little bit on the dangers of Mars last january. They needed to name the Rovers…. ‘Where’s the Air? ‘Dangerous Radiation’ and the ‘I Can’t Breathe’.
The Unwary Human Who Thought He Would Visit Mars.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heininger/p/rovering-mars-it-will-not-be-pleasant?r=16lm0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Personally, I don’t think Mars or any other spot off earth is viable – either technically or economically – as a colony, but we may just see an attempt.
Elon Musk, whatever you may think of him, has quite correctly identified the main barrier to attempting one as the cost per unit mass to get to the surface – he said a billion dollars a ton, which seems about right.
On that basis if you take one human delivered to Mars as requiring 10 tons total landed mass (likely wildly optimistic), that means $10B per colonist / visitor, so not exactly your huddled masses.
Even trimmed by 100X, that’s still 100M a head, so, well, we’ll see if SpaceX can pull off an (unmanned) launch in the 2026 window, and then a manned one in 2029 as Mr.Musk is claiming.
Stephen Johnson: Elon Musk, whatever you may think of him, has quite correctly identified the main barrier to attempting one as the cost per unit mass to get to the surface – he said a billion dollars a ton, which seems about right.
No, it’s not. It is an open question whether Musk is a P.T. Barnum-style promoter consciously telling lies to hype SpaceX’s Starship or just a complete scientific ignoramus.
The latter is seriously possible, however. Here’s why Musk’s claims about using SpaceX’s Starship to send humans to Mars make no sense.
Chemically-fueled rockets — like Starship — are a losing game for sending people anywhere beyond the Moon, first of all. Yes, chemically-fuelled launchers like Apollo or Starship are necessary to provide the brute force to reach Earth escape velocity of 11.2 km per second or 7 miles per second. So, yes, Starship will boost big payloads to Earth orbit or the Moon, if SpaceX gets it working consistently.
But how does a chemically-fueled rocket get the thrust to boost and maneuver beyond that? Only by carrying more fuel.
So then, in order for a Starship full of whatever number of human passengers Musk is claiming he’ll send to Mars to leave Earth orbit for Mars after it’s already used up all its chemical fuel merely getting those human passengers to Earth orbit, Musk proposes to then send up another uncrewed Starship to dock with the first one and refuel it. After which, the first ship with its crew will set out for Mars.
This is a Rube Goldberg proposal with the potential for many failure points on a disastrous scale. Still, for argument’s sake, let’s say that it’s hypothetically manageable. Musk’s proposal then gets more dubious.
Newton’s First Law of Motion, aka the law of inertia, tells us that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction till acted upon by another force. So, yes: once a chemically-fueled Starship with human passengers is refueled and leaves Earth orbit on a trajectory to go anywhere in the Solar System or beyond, that Starship will eventually get where it’s pointed at if no force or object interferes with it on its trajectory.
But reaching Mars by that method will take nine-plus months, during which time that Starship’s human passengers will be exposed to lethal levels of cosmic and solar radiation — possibly worse if the ship gets hit by a solar storm/coronal mass ejection.
And this is the main barrier to getting humans to Mars, not the cost per unit mass.
Musk never addresses this problem, nor even acts like he knows it exists. Still, for argument’s sake, again, let’s suppose he and SpaceX address it and build a Starship with sufficient shielding to protect human passengers. How could they do that? There are two alternatives: –
[1] Build a Starship with sufficient lead or aluminum shielding they’ll have to send it uncrewed into Earth orbit where a second Starship with the human crew will then dock with it, and a third Starship carrying the rocket fuel to go to Mars will then refuel it. Three Starships to launch one towards Mars — even more Rube Goldberg, right?
[2] Alternatively, develop some not now-existing lightweight shielding technology. Theoretical possibilities include: 3D-printed hydrogels water-based polymers which can absorb radiation and are lightweight; graded shielding layered from low-Z and high-Z materials; polymer composites.
It’s unclear what level of protection these still-undeveloped shielding technologies might provide during nine-plus months in interplanetary space. Will they be adequate? We don’t know yet. But for argument’s sake, once again, let’s suppose that at some point in the future human beings carried by SpaceX’s Starship — it doesn’t have to be more than a minority of those setting out — reach Mars.
What then? Once there are humans on Mars’s surface, what do they do? If they don’t dig in, they’ll die long-term from the radiation exposure there. But to dig in, they’ll need to have brought construction equipment and materials — more heavy payload to boost off Earth. Then what do they do for water? Musk proposes that somehow they’ll access it because scientists believe there’s water on Mars. Yet unless we know with absolute certainty where on Mars that water is and Musk’s Starship can land exactly at that location, that crew is will have to drive around on Mars’s surface prospecting for that water and then must somehow mine it. So, more payload to drag from Earth.
Then, too, how can anybody return to Earth? Because that Starship will be out of fuel. Musk proposes that somehow — somehow? — the crew will find and process the raw materials for that fuel on Mars.
I could go on because there are other practical objections, but I’ve got a dinner appointment. I’ve made my point. Musk is a huckster selling the biggest load of bull excrement with this Mars mission of his that I’ve ever heard, like something out of an old Pohl and Kornbluth SF satire.
Yet nobody calls him on it! The question, as I say, therefore becomes: Is Musk a P.T. Barnum-style promoter consciously telling lies to hype SpaceX’s Starship or just a complete scientific ignoramus?
The latter is quite possible. In reality, Musk is a drug addict and a university dropout. He dropped out of the Stanford physics masters program on his first or second day. Among people in the VC community, many claim it was because he simply didn’t have the intellectual candlepower to hang in there. Now this may just be their envy and resentment. But it may not. Finally, too, what does it say about this era of American capitalism that a complete bullsh*tter like Musk could be the world’s richest man and be elevated to be stature he has?
You’re quite right that using one vehicle for Earth orbit launch/reentry, interplanetary transfer, and mars landing/launch seems impractical, at least to me – I’d guess an ion engine powered transfer vehicle which never lands on either body seems more plausible, though I won’t pretend I know anything about any of this. This also can help with travel time, as even a brief look at the rocket equation will confirm.
So I’m not endorsing the specifics of Mr. Musk’s approach – as I said, I see $/kg landed as the key barrier, and we’ll have to see who, if anyone, can bring it down, and how. If that happens, the rest is really a set of Engineering problems, so likely soluble, given enough money & time
Yep, it was definitely him. It could not have been actual rocket scientists landing stuff on Mars back in the day when young Musk was busy apartheiding in South Africa. Rocket science became a thing only when Columbus Musk discovered it and stuck his flag into its ar*e.
Nicely put.
The Chinese are working on photonic and 2D chips. Unfortunately I don’t have the expertise to tell if any of this is realistic.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLbec3P_M4
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.4c07065
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47974-2
Apparently they are preparing for mass production.
Some have suggested that Moore’s law be restated as the “learning curve of the semiconductor industry”.
It is not a physical law.
“Moore’s observation” is better.
This in my view is the fatal flaw of Octavia Butler’s “Parable” books. She gives a vivid description of our future (a bit delayed now since she starts with the US Jackpot in July of 2024) but then invokes the deus ex machina of spaceships going to other planets to save humanity. Isn’t it the same species on the ships that destroyed the Earth?
Superiority never lasts. There is no correlation between intelligence and morality. AI over lords appeared to be the best solution in the old movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, 1951, directed by Robert Wise.
I tried to get the head of the UC Berkeley’s Business School (before anyone ever heard of Haas) interested in Mortimer Adler’s “Desires, Right and Wrong: The Ethics of Enough”, he just walked away from me.