Yves here. Perhaps you feel the same way I do about tech billionaires’ fevered dreams that too often look like not having understood that science fiction is fiction. The idea that they can live forever is also too prominent in their blathering. But I find it so impossible to take seriously that I tune out….which is a mistake since these powerful men on some level believe what they are saying.
Science journalist Adam Becker, in his new book More, Everything, Forever, has done the important public service of wading through these fantastical plans and determining what they amount to.
By Rei Takver, a freelance climate researcher for DeSmog since February 2025. Her work focuses on climate disinformation and environmental justice and has appeared in The ENDS Report and Now Then Magazine. Originally published at DeSmogBlog
In the wildest dreams of tech billionaires, humans colonize the solar system on giant space stations, dodge mortality by uploading their brains into computers, and solve climate change in a single swoop of god-like AI-generated genius.
It’s a hubris that has led Big Tech companies, which until recently were seen as corporate climate leaders with ambitious clean energy goals, to run full-tilt towards oil and gas — powering the rapid expansion of their monstrously energy-hungry AI data centers with natural gas, and holding court with Trump energy officials who deny climate science while championing American fossil fuel “energy dominance.”
To all of this, Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, basically says – Um. No.
Becker’s book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, exposes how tech billionaires’ sci-fi inspired fantasies about ever-more technology making everything, endlessly, better are basically, well — terrible. These billionaires’ promises, in Becker’s careful accounting, veer from what he says is “wildly implausible” to “profoundly immoral” – and ultimately paves the way for a descent into oligarchy.
They’re also, in Becker’s view, emerging as the root of a new, Silicon Valley-styled “insidious form of climate denial” – replete with its own set of what he calls greenwashing tactics.
DeSmog reporter Rei Takver spoke with Becker about what he thinks drives this new kind of climate denialism, and its consequences.
This interview has been condensed and edited for concision and clarity.
Rei Takver: You’ve said that writing More Everything Forever started after uncovering that evangelical Christian tech billionaire and Palantir founder Peter Thiel was funding a science magazine, Inference: International Review of Science, that was publishing not only creationism, but full-on climate science contrarianism. Why did Thiel’s climate denial take you over the edge?
Adam Becker: People take Silicon Valley’s ideas about science and technology very seriously, as though the leaders of the tech industry actually know anything about science or tech. It’s an understandable mistake to make, but it’s a mistake. When I started thinking about what I already knew about that, I realized that there was this through-line in Silicon Valley of climate denial of a kind, usually not the outright climate denial that you find in that Thiel-funded magazine, but a more insidious form of climate denial that minimizes climate change as a problem and says, “Oh, this is something that we can solve later, once we’ve built an [artificial intelligence] god, or gone to space.”
Rei Takver: When I see the phrase “more everything forever,” it conjures visions of endless power — more oil, more gas, more nuclear, forever. You’ve written about how many of these tech billionaires, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, love dreaming about tapping into endless sources of infinite energy — often alongside the Trump administration. Why do you think Altman, and a wide selection of other tech leaders are aligning with the Trump administration’s aggressively fossil-fuel dominant AI energy policy?
Adam Becker: Let me answer your question with a segue. Nuclear fusion is one of these false promises of the tech industry, right? There’s a company, Helion, saying that they’re going to get a nuclear fusion power plant online at commercially competitive rates by 2028. I’m a physicist. That’s delusional. More realistically, we’re talking 40 years, and even that is probably optimistic — 2028 is not going to happen. Guess who’s the single largest investor in Helion and chairman of the board? It is Sam Altman. In an interview in January he was asked, what’s the best way to combat climate change? And he said, oh, we need to loosen up permitting for nuclear fusion plants, something that doesn’t exist and will not exist for probably decades.
Rei Takver: I wonder if Altman knows that himself. He’s written in his personal blog that “the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy,” but also that he’s “unsure” how we’ll power the 21st century. Well, it does seem like he has some idea, since OpenAI is firing up gas turbines to run data centers already.
Adam Becker: I think it’s important to take a careful look at the world view here. Altman hired a Trump natural gas dude [to lead OpenAI’s global energy strategy] because he wants to build out as much AI infrastructure as possible, and he wants to get people to give him as much money as they can — before either the AI bubble pops or they succeed in building an AI god, which is not going to happen.
Rei Takver: Hasn’t Altman even said he believes AGI, artificial general intelligence, a supercomputer that in theory would match or exceed the intelligence of a human being, is going to solve climate change when it’s invented?
Adam Becker: Yeah, he said back in 2023 that climate change isn’t going to be that big a deal for a super intelligent AGI, because we can just ask it for three wishes to solve global warming. That’s not a viable plan. That’s not even a concept of a plan. The thing about these insane, futuristic visions that Altman and other tech billionaires are trying to sell the rest of us on is that it allows them to justify any action that they possibly want to take. As in, sure, we can just burn as many fossil fuels as we want right now, because the AGI is going to solve it for us.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, billionaire venture capitalist, and CEO of a space company [Relativity Space], said a little over a year ago now that“we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” so we need to just burn as much energy as possible, get into AGI now, so the AI will solve climate change for us. That’s a better climate plan.
Solar and renewables are cheaper than they’ve ever been, and more reliable than they’ve ever been, but sure, buddy, we’re not going to meet our climate goals, even if we try. Whatever. I’m sure that the solution is to have people invest in the companies in your venture capitalist portfolio, which, by the way, includes another one of these boondoggle fusion companies.
Rei Takver: Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates have also been backtracking on climate issues recently. Last year, Microsoft announced publicly that its own climate targets had been a “moonshot,” and Bill Gates recently argued that AI will do more to solve climate change than worsen it.
Adam Becker: The idea that tech will save us, and is the only thing that will save us, and will solve every single problem, is something that you see over and over again in the tech industry. It is the idea that, his time, we found the thing that’s going to save the world, the World Wide Web! Oh, no. no, no. What’s going to save people is social media — look at the Arab Spring! Oh, no, no. What’s going to save the world is AI! No. What’s going to save the world is AI data centers in space!
Rei Takver: Speaking of data centers in space, Jeff Bezos is a huge fan, and also a huge fan of expansive space colonization that would see trillions of humans across the solar system. What is going on with this?
Adam Becker: Bezos said recently that he “doesn’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now” because “in the next couple of decades, there will be millions of people living in space.” No, that’s definitely not happening. You are wrong. The only reason you could actually say that with a straight face was you just don’t believe anything that anyone with expertise tells you about the world, or don’t bother to seek it out in the first place before you make statements.
Rei Takver: And part of the reason that Bezos says we need these space colonies is because he thinks there’s just not enough energy on Earth.
Adam Becker: Bezos is right about the fact that if our energy usage growth continues at the current rate, in a few hundred years we will not be able to keep growing our energy usage, because we’ll be using all the energy that the sun delivers to Earth in the form of sunlight. He’s right about that, too. The problem is, first of all, we’re not even going to get close to that. There’s all sorts of reasons why our energy usage is going to have to stop growing way before that point. Even if it doesn’t stop before that point, the waste heat from thermodynamic limits would boil the oceans.
The other way Bezos goes wrong is that after he says “Earth is the best planet,” he then says, so therefore, since we have to go into space to keep growth going, we need to build giant artificial space stations, and then we can have Earth as a kind of like planetary preserve.
Rei Takver: Which doesn’t have any congruence with the fact that his company just sponsored a summit where a bunch of fossil fuel companies came together with Trump energy officials to fantasize about building out more carbon belching, everything in the name of building out AI infrastructure.
Adam Becker: Yup. We get more, everything, forever.
Rei Takver: Elon Musk is also really into space colonies — in his case, on Mars. Musk says humans need to be multi-planetary because we need a backup, and weirdly, he seems to talk more about asteroids hitting the Earth than climate change. Why do you think that is?
Adam Becker: I’m going to quote [astronomer] Lucianne Walcowicz on this. They speculate, and I think they’re probably right, that an asteroid hitting Earth is something that a billionaire can’t be culpable for, right? Billionaires are not complicit in the fact that planet-killing asteroids exist, right? That’s just a fact about the solar system. Of course, it’s also true that if one of those asteroids hit here, it would still be nicer to be on Earth than it would be on Mars. And it’s also true that Mars gets hit with more asteroids than the Earth does.
Musk talks about terraforming Mars … if we have the technology to terraform Mars, why not just use that technology to solve climate change here on Earth? If such technology existed, it would absolutely be easier to use it here to fix climate change, because stopping climate change and getting the climate back into a good state that is compatible with advanced human civilization is so much easier than terraforming Mars. And yet, we have not shown ourselves capable of getting climate change under control. Mars is just a terrible idea as a backup for humanity for so many reasons. Even the idea of a backup for humanity is inherently problematic.
Rei Takver: Totally. In going after a “backup” planet, Musk is not just abdicating responsibility about climate change in a hypothetical future, he’s abdicating responsibility for the climate, and humanity, here and now.
Adam Becker: Oh yeah, I mean, look at the un-permitted natural gas plants that Musk is using to power an xAI data center in Tennessee. These tech billionaires are using these futuristic visions of their technologies to justify continuing extractive practices and continuing to accumulate power and wealth that’s always going to be at the expense of lots of other people. And I don’t think that they’re acting in their own enlightened self interest, right? What good is your money if civilization collapses due to a climate crisis?
Rei Takver: How much would you say we should be thinking of these tech bro fantasies and these tech bros as explicitly anti-climate?
Adam Becker: That’s exactly what they are. They do not care about the climate because they don’t see it as a problem, which is a form of climate denial, right? They think, we’ll fix it in post, basically, right? That’s essentially Sam Altman’s answer about climate change is: “Oh, yeah, we’ll get to AI and then we can fix everything else with that.” That’s not going to happen. And they just don’t think that anything else is as important as these futuristic fantasies that they have about AI in space and, you know, having more everything forever. Even the nuclear fusion stuff, where they say, “Oh yeah, this is green energy.” It’s not going to happen. And so what it is, is essentially a form of greenwashing, by using false promises of a futuristic green energy technology that is not going to arrive in time, if ever, as an excuse to temporarily use fossil fuels as transition to this technology that will never come, instead of just using the abundant, cheap green energy technology that we have now.
Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever can be purchased in the U.S., UK, and Canada.
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Well, it will have to be “giant artificial space stations” with artificial gravity because human beings get unwell in zero gravity, so forget fixed Moonbases and similar.
However, these “giant artificial space stations” will house perhaps 10s to 100s of thousands people, so a solution for an elite only.
I am assuming that they plan on having them spun to achieve rotational “gravity”, similar to 2001: Space Odyessy.
That being said, these science fiction dreams of theirs are still a long way off, as the materials and engineering needed to build closed habitats/ecosystems in space is still probably centuries away.
The whole AI hype is mostly nonsense, as while “AI” does have its uses for statistical analysis and extrapolation, it is merely a tool like anything else, and expecting it to be anything more than a “Chinese Room” for the foreseeable future is ridiculous, and there are also many things that AI simply cannot do, despite how the AI-bros want to pretend otherwise.
I am not even against the idea of setting up colonies in space, because I think it would be unwise to put all of humanity’s eggs in one basket in the event of something like the inevitable impact of a large meteor with Earth.
However, these billionaires need to be reigned in since they are basically trying to set up their own private colonies that they can lord over like god-emperors, much like the autocratic fantasies espoused by Balaji Srinivasan.
The workers assembling the place won’t have that luxury though…
10s to 100s of thousands? My guess is the “giant artificial space stations” will be designed to house 144 thousand people – 12 thousand from each of the tribes of Israel. The rest of us get to enjoy what Earth has to offer. I bet we’ll last longer than the space giants.
The idea of rockets to Mars and setting up a human civilisation is the Tech Bro/SillyCon Valley equivalent to the “Kinetic Arm” of the Military Industrial Complex for feeding off the source of public money and producing ineffective weaponry. Just another mechanism for a flow of public money into the pockets of the wealthiest.
As I keep saying look to the HBO satire Silicon Valley for the reality of the tech bros. In the show it’s all about venture investors and the villainous owner of a major tech company who acts out of ego and considers the idealistic to be chumps. It shows how this culture reverses the usual sequence and makes invention the mother of necessity as long as there are billions to be raked in. When it all goes wrong the villain retires to his Indian ashram.
So yes it’s about alternate forms of religion that will discard inconvenient (to some Christians too of course) Christian ethics. At least in the first Gilded Age exposure as a crook hurt your social standing.
“Musk talks about terraforming Mars … if we have the technology to terraform Mars, why not just use that technology to solve climate change here on Earth? ”
This seems to be the most obvious question one can ask. All of these fantasies about roaming the solar system for a new home, after we ruin our current one, imply a rather infantile mentality, exceeded only by its hubris.
Humans are terraforming Earth. Only, it is making it hospitable to denzens of the Cretaceous period. If anyone thinks humans are going to survive the later Anthropocene, there idiots; or worse, they’re toxic optimists.
The corporate climate leaders do care about the climate, but the security surveillance and carbon credits part, where they make a shit ton of money grifting off the state to build out their control grid.
They leave the eschatological doom porn to the idiots who actually believe it and will advertise it for free.
Will the PRC sell Musk and Bezos the solar panels for SpaceX to lift to whatever orbit level gets sun all the time, and do the PV arrays cool themselves and their shade cool the massive numbers of NVDA GPU spewing heat….
Will Musk claim SpaceX profits lifting GPUs with circular financing from NVDA from its sales to Musk.
Besides getting space certified PV arrays, how cheap does lift to suitable orbit for a kg have to get, unless the Silicon Valley credit system approaches high earth orbit level.
Or is SpacX trillion dollar valuation based on fictional revenue flow from Musk owning Mars.
There seems to be some sort of formatting error with this page, the side bar with Tip Jar and all that is at the bottom of the page and the comments are 2-3x wider than the content of the article. I tried reloading a couple of times but that didn’t fix it, and all the other pages look normal.
Sorry for that. There was a stray div tag at the end that carried over from the original post that I missed. Fixed.
There are two ways of thinking. One is to think in terms of possibility and the other probability. It is possible an asteroid will hit the earth but the evidence shows the probability is near zero.
It is possible the climate will collapse and the evidence shows the probability is very high it will collapse unless something is done.
Thinking in terms of possibility and ignoring probability is normally a sign of mental illness, in that, you are not rational and not connected to reality.
> Thinking in terms of possibility and ignoring probability
It could be considered a form of magical thinking. Perhaps that’s a symptom of mental illness; if so, illness is very widespread.
I listened to this audiobook and Empire of AI. Both books are great counterpoints to the Silicon Valley (and their media cheerleaders) hype train.
If I wanted to secure vast resources to build out my space surveillance and war empire, I might also say my intention was something little more benign, like we’re going to Mars to save humankind.
Are their sci-fi fantasies just an attempt to stave off an economic collapse by keeping people optimistic about the future, or perhaps to keep the venture capital flowing? If we’re collectively pessimistic why would we invest in the future?
Reminds me of Octavia Butler’s two Parable books. A compelling description of a post-apocalyptic US (starting July 20th, 2024) but in the end, salvation comes from a cult blasting off in rocket ships to, what, pollute another world with humans? Terribly disappointing ending to an evocative story.
Not mentioned is that most of the bros have bunkers.
I loves me some science fiction. Always have. It’s one of my favorite genres of fiction, and I love to be hypnotized by the worlds woven by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. And I think there’s a cogent argument to be made that the transhumanist ideology operates within a construct of already existing electric dreams of the android sheep, and that we our increasingly those sheep.
I work with a mostly non-verbal autistic kid. One of his favorite jokes is to point behind someone, and then melt down in belly laughs when they turn to look. Gotcha!
At the risk of giving these tech bros too much credit, they have access to more information than I do, and I know these fevered electric dreams are non-rational. The reality is far starker than the shadows on the cave wall would have us believe, and I think they know it too. Think about it. If you have concluded — as I have — that the end is indeed nigh, if you see that Mother Nature has just begun the process of taking a wrecking ball to the gossamer threads of what we call civilization, when you know that energy depletion represents a hard brake to the explosion of our global population and is most immediate and only rectifiable, if ever, over a geological time scale, then … what to do? It seems that TPTB have a dyadic choice: Do we tell em the truth? Or do we spin some fairytales and lull these little lambs to sleep? (Eschatological ideology can get away with a bit more truthiness here, albeit with the rapture business thrown in for palatability.)
It seems to me that if we were to know the truth of things globally, things would get very ugly very quickly. And that ugliness would settle upon those we’ve relied on to inform our newly shattered worldviews. Hence the bunkers. Better to weave those electric dreams, keep the sheep in their pens, and slaughter those who refuse to sleep or to stay in the pen. And they are certainly not going to worry about grid destabilization, famine, and war. Those things are just helpful.
10 million people on Mars? Space stations surrounding our world because it’s still over-populated? Replicants?
Gotcha!
They may talk about data centers in space but the truth is that because they are talking about launching a million satellites around earth, that a Kessler Syndrome will be inevitable meaning the astronauts on the ISS and the takonauts on the Chinese space station will have to abandon them and get back to Earth on their evacuation capsules before those stations are turned to shrapnel as well. We will lose space for centuries if not thousands of years meaning no satellites and forever being imprisoned on Earth.
I’m sure the engineers at Google and elsewhere realize that data centers in space are infeasible, and these ideas are just things to sell to not-so-technically knowledgeable investors, no? Most fundamentally, how are going to cool them in space? Radiative cooling is the only means (in space’s vacuum there is nothing to convect or conduct heat), and this has Stefan-Boltzmann T^4 dependence in temperature. Works great for radiating EM energy from the sun, but for trying to maintain a CPU within op limits, not so much. Satellites do this, but for a space data center require making radiators that are hotter than what you’re trying to cool (requiring a lot additional power), a very large surface area (adds mass), and sophisticated and reliable control machinery. Cooling stuff on Earth is easy by comparison.
It’s already dangerous to be in orbit from micro meteorites. https://www.space.com/international-space-station-space-dodge-debris-how-often.
Thanks for this. Becker’s first book on quantum mechanics was quite good. Adding this one to the list.
Hmh, I think it might not be bad idea if we all stop calling it AI ourselves and instead use the term SI (Simulated Intelligence) to take a bit of the foul wind out of this bubble. LLMs are not intelligence, just a statistical model that fools people into thinking that it is intelligence. It’s like believing that a parrot who can croak Shakespeare is an excellent poet. Although I would say that a parrot at least has actual intelligence compared to SI.
I’m in for it…SI…
I prefer automated imitation.
What I’m thinking is that possibly all the data centers will burn themselves up before anything else significant can be done in space.
This’ll probably be simple for someone knowledgeable about all this to answer. Why wouldn’t the very last chapter [in the west] be a matter of only the Big 7 are left standing; and then, when all their respective AIs try to out smart each other, circuits get overloaded?