musk's fear of "woke a.i." might have killed his martian dreams

Musk's partner in accelerationist chaos, Peter Thiel, says that SpaceX's Mars city was smothered after meeting both reality and his paranoia.

Mars always seemed on have a grip on our imagination. The first fuzzy glances at its surface showed us a world that was covered in weird shades of red and butterscotch, but also seemed a lot like deserts in South America and large swaths of the American Southwest. And when in the late 1800s astronomers thought they saw long channels on its surface, decades of frenzy followed as millions, including some very vocal and persuasive scientists, believed there was either an alien civilization either living there, or trying to stave off extinction as Mars dried and froze.

In a way, this fixation makes sense. Venus and Mars are our planetary twins. It’s just that Venus is a sister that for reasons we still don’t quite understand burned itself to a crisp, and Mars is the brother that aged severely and prematurely, afflicted with what can be thought of a cosmic progeria thanks to its size. We can look at both worlds to see similarities with ours and dream of visiting and taming them.

Which brings us to SpaceX. The world’s richest man-child, MAGA financier, breeding enthusiast, and “Roman salute” aficionado Elon Musk founded it after a lecture on the future of humanity and the need to explore Mars from space exploration advocate and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin. He was so inspired, he rushed to Moscow in a bid to buy an ICBM made in my hometown in Ukraine as a shortcut for what, with NASA’s help, would become the Falcon rockets.

Since the very start, the goal for his rocket company’s existence was to get to Mars so he could build the first human city on another world. Come hell or high water, he’d put humans on the planet’s surface by the end of 2021. Err, no, 2024. Wait, 2026. Or likely by 2030. Maybe 2031. Definitely by 2045 according to the latest NYT puff piece.

Or, maybe never. According to a podcast episode featuring Peter Thiel, who is aiming to own the looming MAGA surveillance state, and Ross Douthat, a sex bot aficionado, as well as a national voice for debate club incels, Musk has actually given up all hope for a SpaceX rocket to get to Mars in his lifetime.

Not only that, but it appears that the final blow wasn’t just the slow progress on what was once not-so-tongue-in-cheek called the BFR, or Big Fucking Rocket. No, it was a chat with Demis “My AI Will Set Out To Conquer The Galaxy In 2030” Hassabis, after which he decided that his libertarian utopia on Mars could be infiltrated by “woke AI” from Google and the U.S. government.

Thiel would very likely know if this was the case, and this also tracks with Musk’s own lamentations in 2020 about how difficult it’s proving for SpaceX to build a proper and reliable trans-planetary rocket that doesn’t explode on the launch pad. Sorry, I meant undergoes a rapid, unscheduled disassembly during static firing. Sounds a tad better than “his rockets just keep blowing up,” you know? It also lines up with Musk’s habit of constant rage-tweeting about wokeness and plan to pretty much train his pet chatbot Grok on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and far right 4chan memes.

Here’s the thing though. Space is hard. There’s a reason we say that something isn’t rocket science or brain surgery interchangeably. I can only imagine how difficult it is to be Gwynne Shotwell who actually has to make sure those rockets get made and fly while her boss is promising dominion over the solar system by end of fiscal year. Ego and hubris can move markets and win elections, but they cannot change the laws of physics or the limitations of biology.

Even Musk’s once mentor Zubrin blasted his ambitions as detached from reality, and it’s very difficult to find a bigger proponent of aggressive space exploration out there. Meanwhile, scientists who actually study what it would take to live on Mars warn that without altering our biology, the maximum safe duration of a mission is four years, and the word safe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as a significant increase in cancer risk over the astronaut’s lifetime will be inevitable.

In reality, whether his libertarian utopia was going to be invaded by an AI that was too woke for his tastes doesn’t really matter. His project was pretty much doomed like all libertarian ventures to secede from the rest of society so far, and for the same reason. People with more money then sense tend to either ignore or drastically underestimate the necessary logistics because they’re the human equivalent of cats. Territorial and fiercely independent. Until it’s time for dinner and the food bowl is empty.

Of course, the point of this isn’t to say that traveling to Mars is impossible and we will never do it. Extreme naysaying is both unproductive and shortsighted, and I will stand by that statement. One day, we will know enough and have the technology to take on settling other worlds — after we figure out how to settle the Moon first, of course. But it will take time, dedication, effort, and more than just a pittance of a rounding error of a budget that’s now facing draconian cuts.

I agree with Zubrin and many other space exploration enthusiasts that we need to be a multi-planetary species at some point in our future and we’re such explorers in our heart of hearts that we’ll figure out a way to do that someday. It is a good idea in the long term, and we should absolutely work towards it.

But we need to explore the solar system as beyond because we as a civilization, as a species decide that this is where we want to put our time, effort, and resources, sold on the technological, medical, and emotional benefits of once again exploring rather than the boring cyberpunk dystopia we’re creating for ourselves right now. We’re not going to make it happen because a rich guy declared he would save humanity with a magical rocket that’s always ten to fifteen years away from completion, so we need to give him money. About $38 billion of it to be precise.

Sure, we could use a cheerleader or a hundred to help sell us on the idea. Pretty much every concept needs an advocate because data seldom speaks for itself, and abstract long term projects are difficult to get your head around without someone willing to go into details and explain again and again. Yet, I can think of hundreds of far better and way more reliable advocates than Musk. Actual scientists, engineers, doctors, and sci-fi authors, not a government-minted oligarch cosplaying as a genius.