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Amid the dizzying acceleration of headlines and debate about the vital global transition to renewable energy, new research shows how that change could destabilize dozens of fragile states that depend heavily on oil exports. The new study underscores that governments and international institutions will need to guard against risks that the shift away from carbon-heavy fuels will inadvertently upset political balances and potentially ignite violent conflicts in a swath of nations from Venezuela to Nigeria to Iraq and beyond. Above all, the research suggests, the world must avoid an unplanned “traumatic decarbonization” of these economies.

The U.S. recommitment to the Paris climate accords — plus summit conferences called by the Biden administration, the G7 nations and NATO — reflect the reality that countries are moving to cut their oil consumption in hope of constraining the planet’s warming. Politicians in the world’s more comfortably developed nations focus on managing this transition to serve their own economies and polities, meeting costs and generating jobs, with an eye toward winning the next election.

NEW YORK, July 13 (Reuters) - Oil prices rose over 1% on Thursday to their highest in nearly three months after U.S. inflation data suggested interest rates in the world's biggest economy were close to their peak.

Brent crude futures rose $1.25, or 1.6%, to settle at $81.36 per barrel. The session peak was $81.57, the highest since April 25.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

What about freedom? There’s a strong strain of libertarianism among recent space expansionists (as well as among many Silicon Valley types, especially when it comes to the regulation of technology), but it is not obvious that the project will enhance human freedom overall, whether for remaining Terrans or in space. This is in large measure a product of the perpetual war footing on which such adventurism will place us all. Each world in the space archipelago can legitimize steep political hierarchies as a necessary means for dealing with perceived external threats. And such security-based political hierarchies inevitably bring more or less severe restrictions of individual liberties, at least for those on the bottom of the heap. Deudney concludes: The association of space expansion with the preservation and expansion of individual freedom is probably extremely dubious. Space expansion, far from being a form of freedom insurance, is more likely to produce the perfection of despotism and the complete subordination of the individual to the collective. Those who value individual liberty should be strong skeptics and opponents of space expansion, not enthusiastic supporters.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

That brings us, finally, to the other two attempted justifications for space expansion: that the program will safeguard the long-term future of our species and that it will enhance human freedom. The first idea arises from the observation that given the inevitable heat death of the sun a billion or so years from now, our career on this planet is ultimately doomed, so we’d better figure out a way of transporting ourselves out of the solar system as soon as possible. The idea seems to be that discovering the planet’s finitude has somehow massively accelerated the imperative to leave it. In a remark quoted by many space expansionists pushing this line of thought, Tsiolkovsky once said that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.” This is a stunningly silly argument. It’s a bit like learning you will have to leave the family nest several years down the road, then deciding you had better start packing right away. As Deudney notes, we have a few hundred million years to prepare for the Sun’s death, making that event completely irrelevant to our policy choices in the coming decades and centuries. Perhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two. Just a suggestion.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

We might shrug off this worry. After all, we are talking here about wars among humans and semi-humans unfolding at the farthest reaches of traversable space. But the risks to Earth security posed by even minimal expansion—say, establishing a fully independent Martian colony—is just as dire. Earth will be extremely difficult to defend from hostile galactic groups since we Terrans are stuck at the bottom of a relatively deep gravity well. Rockets must achieve an escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull, which is why almost all the rocket’s fuel is burned in this stage of the flight; getting back is comparatively easy. So, unfortunately, is lobbing weapons down at us from the elevated height of the Moon, a nearby asteroid, a space platform or Mars itself (whose gravity well is shallower than ours). We might suddenly find ourselves occupying catastrophically low strategic ground vis-à-vis our Martian (or other interstellar) enemies. The failure to grapple with this kind of scenario underlines what Deudney takes to be an entirely unexamined assumption of space expansionists: that “humanity will be succeeded by creatures who are significantly better than humans.” He calls this the ascensionist assumption, the notion that by going up we will inevitably become morally and politically better. So of course space colonists and their descendants pose no threat to us. Again, the point is not limited to space cowboys. Most techno-utopians—the giddier boosters of geoengineering, Artificial Superintelligence, nanotech, de-extinction, genetic enhancement, you name it—operate with some version of this background assumption. And that is putting the case charitably, because the other alternative is that they simply don’t care about the potentially catastrophic consequences of their dreams and schemes. But evolutionary theory gives us no reason to endorse any version of the ascensionist assumption. It is obviously not the case that over 3.5 billion years of development, species—including Homo sapiens—have become appreciably more tolerant of each other. Life has always been, and remains, red in tooth and claw. In fact, while appealing to evolutionary arguments, space expansionists are covertly counting on the magical disappearance of this aspect of the evolutionary process. It appears that even as we bring life generously to space, we run the very significant risk of erasing our own future: Habitat space expansionists are in effect saying that humanity will—and should—pursue a series of steps that will lead inevitably to its own demise. Space expansion may be an agenda of survival for life, but for humanity it is an expensive suicide cult.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

Deudney arrives at this insight by placing the drive to colonize the heavens in the larger context of the twentieth-century development of weapons of mass destruction as well as the efforts we have made—via bilateral and multilateral treaties and other legal regimes—to contain the threat they pose. The book’s thesis is that unfettered space expansion is likely to increase the threat of large-scale violence and generally exacerbate human insecurity. If we adopt this approach, Mars colonization should be shelved, for now at least, while we expand and enhance the terms of the Outer Space Treaty, an international agreement crafted in 1966 that places limits on various forms of space adventurism and militarization (for starters, nobody can own the moon). Because it is unapologetically boring, hard-core expansionists will loathe the CSP. With its focus on rules and restraints, it can sound like the over-anxious parent wagging a scolding finger at the impetuous teenager who just wants to have some harmless fun. The problem is that there’s nothing harmless about space expansion. Deudney’s book exposes the persistent refusal of its advocates to think meaningfully about the consequences of their proposals. So just as we parents seek various ways of restraining the teenager who sees no problem with doing hard drugs, binge drinking, or driving at breakneck speed, we should find ways of curbing the urge to “leave the Earth.” Dull advice if your dream was to, say, terraform Mars. But perhaps boring is not so bad in this area. “Space choices,” Deudney remarks drily, “are too important to be left to space cadets.” The same has been said about several other meeting places of science and society in the twentieth century—the development of nuclear weapons, above all. For Deudney, it is crucial to emphasize that the intercontinental ballistic missiles we already have are in fact “the quintessential space weapon.” They mark a major weapons innovation because they arc through space on their way across the globe. The frictionless medium allows them to travel at roughly 10,000 miles per hour and thus reach their intercontinental targets in under half an hour. (For a sense of scale, recall the Earth’s equator is just shy of 25,000 miles long.) In the beginning we went to space with the express mission of winning the Cold War and becoming more efficient at killing each other, a historical reality that tugs against the breathless visions of the technologists. In fact, this past looms over the whole subsequent project of space expansion. The quest to inhabit other worlds, Deudney suggests, has piggybacked on this darker purpose without ever fully coming to terms with it. If this is right, we must look beyond the breezy pleadings of space expansion’s most ardent advocates and examine the actual arguments for this grand vision. There have been three broad patterns of attempted justification. The first appeals to evolution, the second to long-term human security, and the last to the expansion of human freedom.

(Byron Williston is Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, , 5-26)

To get a sense of the first attempted justification, by far the most ubiquitous of the three, return to that SpaceX promo-video. Narrated by Musk himself, the “case” for Mars it lays out has been invoked by space expansionists since humans began fantasizing about occupying other celestial bodies—asteroids, moons, and planets—and building rockets powerful enough to take us to them. The simple idea is that expansion is the next step in evolution and that we ought to push it forward. Life has evolved from single-celled organisms, has migrated from the oceans onto land, has exploded into myriad forms of multi-celled organisms, and has somehow produced consciousness. The next step, Musk says, is surely to make life “multiplanetary.” With characteristic inarticulacy he summarizes the argument this way: “if something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it’s important.” It’s not obvious whether that’s a tautology or a non sequitur, but in either case it is breathtakingly facile. You get the impression that the appeal to evolution is semi-intellectual cover for Musk’s sense of wonder at his own chutzpah. This feeling that they are doing something so big that it defies all attempts at rational comprehension shows up frequently among technology’s high priests. To take just one example, neurosurgeon and entrepreneur Eric Leuthard launched a neuroprosthetic startup some years ago, with the aim of connecting the brain in various ways to a digitized environment. Why? “Maybe for no other reason than I think it’s amazingly cool.” Musk’s comment is no deeper than this, but there is something uniquely problematic about all the talk of evolution. For Deudney it represents the typical space expansionist “fusion of technological Prometheanism with large-scope narratives of the tendencies and trajectories of life,” and is thus “fundamentally troubled.” On Earth, speciation can occur when spatially expanding populations become geographically isolated from one another (the unique diversity of species on the Galapagos Islands is the paradigm example of this phenomenon). Because of the vast distances between planets it is likely that similar fragmentation would eventually occur in outer space. Along with the interplanetary spread of cyborgs and artificial intelligences, the result, centuries after a viable Mars colony is established, will probably be a plethora of intelligent species, all of which will have evolved to fit their distinctive ecological constraints—an archipelago of politically distinct worlds. The idea is common in sci-fi, from Verner Vinge’s 1993 A Fire Upon the Deep to Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby’s The Expanse, both Hugo Award winners. Multi-world pluralism can look attractive if we assume that everyone will get along, regardless of the profound morphological, technological, and ideological differences that are bound to grow up around and between these groups. Here, however, the space expansionist invocation of natural selection bites back. Radiating and diversifying species notoriously compete with one another for available space and its resources or, in the case of intelligent species, just for glory and prestige. This is all familiar enough from the history of life on Earth, as is the mostly sorry result of the human interaction with other species as well as earlier human groups. We exterminated the Neanderthals (after breeding with them for a while) and are, according to the United Nations, currently in the process of eviscerating the non-human biosphere. Doesn’t it seem likely that our deep-space descendants will inherit these destructive tendencies and turn them on each other? A space archipelago will be composed of mutually suspicious and competitive groups, millions of them eventually. But the bonds of sameness that can foster respectful recognition or mutual forbearance will surely diminish with increased interplanetary spatial dispersion and the ordinary workings of evolution. Not that we should expect a space-based Hobbesian war of all against all. There will doubtless be a good deal of room for interspecies and interworld diplomacy in this scenario. However, in the absence of a pacific trans-planetary government—and given our inability to create a single world government here, the chances of that seem slim—opportunities for plunder and general mayhem will likely abound. The temptation to cast the interplanetary Other as subhuman will be pronounced. Remember that the intelligent aliens in Starship Troopers are “bugs,” and in Battlestar Galactica they are “toasters.” Even in our fiction, it seems, we have a difficult time imagining what peaceful co-existence among wildly disparate beings might look like. Because of this, all minimally viable colonies will have compelling reasons of state to stockpile awesome weapons of mass destruction: not only hydrogen bombs, but more importantly the ability to convert asteroids into planetoid bombs. Somehow this possibility—potentially genocidal or xenocidal wars of worlds—seems not to matter much to space expansionists, even though it’s standard fare in the well of sci-fi from which many of them have drunk so deeply.

(Bruce, , 5-25)

So Far Away The Apollo astronauts could fly to the moon in just a few days, but a trip to Mars would take anywhere between six to nine months. With the distance between Mars and Earth varying between 35 million miles and 249 million miles due to their elliptical orbits, there’s only a small window available when the two are ideally aligned for space travel. That makes logistics much trickier. With lunar exploration, “there’s always the prospect of rescue or provisioning or supply from Earth or from a midway space station,” said Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide and a member of the advisory council of the Space Industry Association of Australia. “That’s not going to be the case for Mars.” Solar Killers A long flight would expose humans to one of space travel’s biggest terrors: solar flares. The most powerful type of explosion in the solar system, a flare is the equivalent of 100 million hydrogen bombs. The Earth’s magnetic field can shield astronauts in orbit, but a deep-space traveler hit by such radiation would not be able to survive more than a few days. “It’s a very gruesome way to die,” said Lewis Dartnell, a professor and specialist in astrobiology in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Westminster in London. He does research linked to life on Mars. The Apollo program didn’t address this issue, choosing instead to take the chance that the few days of a lunar mission wouldn’t coincide with a solar event. It would be a different story for multi-month trips to Mars. Water tanks onboard the spacecraft could act as shields if positioned properly, said Dartnell, so in the event of a flare, travelers could retreat to the spacecraft’s version of a panic room surrounded by water tanks. The problem is detecting activity on the Sun, especially on the side not facing the Earth. “How can we make our space weather prediction good enough that we can give the crew notice?” he said. “We don’t have established capacity to observe the Sun from different angles for tracking solar storms.” Radiation isn’t just a problem en route. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth and doesn’t have a global magnetic shield, so humans on the planet’s surface would be at risk of exposure to solar and cosmic radiation. Moreover, the surface itself is largely dust, and massive storms can create dust clouds that block out the Sun, said Nilton Renno, a professor at the University of Michigan whose research interests include astrobiology. During such a storm, “it’s almost like midnight on the surface of Mars for two months,” Renno said. “If you are there with solar panels for power, you very likely don’t survive. You don’t have enough energy to keep things warm enough.” One solution would be for humans to use that dust to protect themselves, lining shelters with sandbags filled with Martian soil that could block out radiation, said Joseph Michalski, an associate professor who explores the habitability of Mars at the University of Hong Kong. Humans could also return to their cave-dwelling roots by finding temporary shelter in some of the planet’s many lava tubes, large caverns from ancient times when Mars had volcanic activity. Food, Water and Oxygen In “The Martian” -- the 2015 Hollywood blockbuster -- Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut grew potatoes by fertilizing the planet’s soil with his own feces. Elisabeth Hausrath, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has more modest farming ambitions. For the past year and a half, NASA has been supporting her research into growing snow algae, a type that’s common in the Nevada desert and other high-altitude, low-nutrient environments on Earth, in conditions mimicking those of Mars. “They’ve been growing great,” she said. The idea is that the algae could grow in greenhouses made of flexible material similar to that of a space suit. Growing algae in such conditions could not only create a source of food but also produce oxygen. The research is still in its early stages. Scientists also still need to resolve how humans could get enough water to survive on Mars. The planet does have some sub-surface ice that could be water sources and a future Mars mission will need to use radar to map its distribution, said Victoria Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Once you know where the ice is, those are locations where you might send humans,” she said. Getting Back Home Unless everyone signs up for a one-way trip, humans traveling to Mars will need to take a rocket back to Earth. Figuring out how to get fuel to power that spacecraft back into space is the biggest technological hurdle would-be Mars explorers face, said Michalski. “It’s not the case that we would bring the rocket fuel with us,” he said. “It’s just too heavy.”

(James Prell is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He reads and writes about science, technology, and society. )

In an interview with the American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2010, Stephen Colbert called astronauts “the supermodels of science.” The bit was satirical, but Colbert had a point: for many, spaceflight is sexy. The serious question is: do we actually need to send people into space—supermodels or not? In recent years, buzz has surrounded the partnership between NASA and SpaceX, a company whose founder, Elon Musk, has famously stated that he will launch the first manned mission to Mars in 2024. On February 6, SpaceX ran its first test launch of the Falcon Heavy, a rocket system with three reusable boosters that Musk says is the precursor to the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket, that he intends to build in order to carry the first colonists to Mars. For Musk, an independent colony on Mars would function as a way to "back up the biosphere." If anything were to happen on Earth that could cause an extinction event, such as nuclear war or a meteor strike, Musk sees Mars as a way to ensure that humanity survives. This existential reasoning for traveling to the red planet does come with a problem. We have barely developed the technology to consistently launch these rockets. Musk is confident in the tech behind his reusable boosters, but experts like Dan Dumbacher—a former NASA employee—remain skeptical. “We tried to make [the space shuttle] reusable for 55 flights,” he told SpaceNews in 2014. “Look how long and how much money it took for us to do that, and we still weren’t completely successful for all the parts. I want to be realistic: We are not as smart as we think we are and we don’t understand the environment as well as we think we do.” The cost of each launch during the space shuttle program, with refurbishment costs taken into account, ran between $450 million and $1.5 billion. SpaceX’s account of their costs have been well below those figures, averaging between $61.2 million and $42.8 million per launch. However, the private company does not have 30 years’ worth of data on refurbishment costs at this point, so it is too early to celebrate its success. And that’s just getting off the ground. It would cost between $121 and $48 billion per person per year to sustain a Martian colony according to data from Popular Science Magazine in 2013, but the real cost is impossible to know without actually going. Why should we spend time and resources trying to survive on Mars when we could be working to understand how to survive on earth in the event of the kind of catastrophe that set Musk’s eye on Mars in the first place? If some group were to attempt the journey today, they would need access to technologies that would make them as self-sufficient as possible. After all, Earth would be nearly 33.9 million miles away during its closest pass to the red planet. Water recovery systems that reclaim vapor, wastewater, and urine — like the ones currently installed on the International Space Station — would have to be used on the journey, and sent ahead to Mars along with habitats ready for assembly upon the astronauts’ arrival. According to NASA such a system would have to have an efficiency much higher than the current 74% in order to be viable for deep space missions. The same goes for oxygen regeneration and carbon dioxide removal, which, as of today stands at around 40% efficiency and “must increase significantly” before anyone attempts the journey to Mars. As for food, astronauts would have to rely on a one-time supply of food sent ahead, or attempt to grow it themselves along the way. Since self-sustainability is key, a mission hoping to survive on the dead surface of Mars would likely rely on greenhouses, such as the inflatable ones in development under Dr. Ray Wheeler at NASA. These greenhouses use hydroponic farming techniques to grow crops and “sustain astronauts on a vegetable diet,” with the added benefit of helping carbon dioxide, oxygen, and wastewater management. While all of these systems might be ready for use by a small crew within a few years, a colony of a size large enough to safeguard humanity from extinction would push them to the breaking point. It would take, optimistically, decades before Mars was truly self-sufficient, and that time and money could be spent working to prevent the kind of disasters that threaten our existence on Earth, such as natural disasters related to climate change. On its best day, Mars still barely has an atmosphere. Its core is inactive, which means that it lacks any kind of magnetic field to block out the most intense solar radiation. It is a dead planet that would take efforts only dreamed about in science fiction to colonize. Even Earth after total nuclear war would be easier to live on. There is scientific value in the exploration of other planets, but discoveries can be achieved without the steep added cost of having to keep an astronaut alive during the trip. Compared to the projected cost of a Martian base, NASA’s Curiosity rover cost a fraction of that, coming in at $2.5 billion. Curiosity has far exceeded its life expectancy of two years and continues to operate today, with the added benefit of not needing to eat, breath, or worry about dying from radiation exposure.

(Zahaan works for Google and is a recipient of Nasa’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal for YouTube Space Lab. )

The most polarising issue in the Mars debate is arguably the tension between those dreaming of a second home and those prioritising the one we have now. Before his death, Stephen Hawking made the bleak prediction that humanity only had 100 years left on Earth. Faced with a growing list of threats – climate change, overpopulation, nuclear war – Hawking believed that we had reached "the point of no return" and had no choice as a species but to become multi-planetary – starting with the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk has also said on numerous occasions that we need a “backup planet” should something apocalyptic – like an asteroid collision – destroy Earth. However, not everyone agrees. In the Pew survey mentioned earlier, a majority of US adults believed that Nasa’s number one priority should be fixing problems on Earth. The billions – if not trillions – of dollars needed to colonise Mars could, for example, be better spent investing in renewable forms of energy to address climate change or strengthening our planetary defences against asteroid collisions. And of course, if we have not figured out how to deal with problems of our own making here on Earth, there is no guarantee that the same fate would not befall Mars colonists. Furthermore, if something truly horrible were to happen on Earth, it’s not clear Mars would actually be an effective salvation. Giant underground bunkers on Earth, for example, could protect more people, more easily than a colony on Mars. And in the event of apocalyptic scenario, it is possible that the conditions on Earth – however horrific – may still be more hospitable than the Martian wasteland. Let's not forget that Mars has next to no atmosphere, only one third gravity and is exposed to surface radiation approximately 100 times greater than on Earth.

(Tom covers breaking news and writes features. He has reported for U.S. News & World Report, Slate and Atlantic Media. , June)

Musk has long favored Mars colonization as a means to survive what he calls an “inevitable” extinction event on Earth. On its website, SpaceX says that the company was founded in 2002 “with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” The tech entrepreneur reiterated that survivalist message in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, saying humans have to become “a multiplanetary species” and build complete cities on Mars with all the amenities, including “iron foundries, pizza joints, you name it.” Voices in popular culture and social media have echoed this argument for why NASA and its presumed international partners should spend years of work and billions of dollars sending humans to Mars. Interviews with a broad range of scientists and futurists, however, reveal skepticism about the wisdom and feasibility of selling Mars as “Planet B.” The implication that Mars colonization should be prioritized over fixing Earth’s problems, such as climate change, unsettles Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “Mars is not an escape hatch for planet Earth,” Hayhoe says. “If we do not take action to reduce and eventually eliminate our carbon emissions, they will overwhelm human civilization as we know it, long before Mars is ready to be colonized by large numbers of people.” A Mars colony would need a huge investment of supply ships to keep settlers alive in the toxic, freezing Martian environment, but the numerous abandoned bases in Antarctica show that building cities in less hazardous places on Earth is difficult enough. Advocates of a colony tout the potential to mine water and rare minerals on the red planet, but searching for resources or avoiding a potential asteroid strike on Earth are not immediate enough motivations to inspire a Mars settlement, says Andy Weir, author of “The Martian,” which depicts an astronaut stranded on Mars. “I don’t believe there will ever be a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon or anywhere else off Earth until there’s an economic reason for it,” Weir says. “Whatever Earth’s problems are, it’s considerably easier to fix Earth than it is to colonize Mars.” Weir and others consider Mars an inhospitable place where the first goal should be research rather than settlement, at least for the near future. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, points to exploration of Antarctica as a realistic model for how Mars might be studied. International research stations on Antarctica host rotating scientific teams, and this strategy has kept a sustained but limited human presence there. “There is an escapism to wanting to go to Mars and start anew,” Lee says of the appeal of colonization. “The issue with that particular enticing concept is — ‘to go to what?’ You would need an entire infrastructure set up in advance to support people there.” Missions to Mars don’t need to result in colonization to improve humanity’s chances of survival, says Robert Zubrin, president of the nonprofit Mars Society, which advocates for research to explore and study the red planet. The Mars Society is training people at research stations in the Canadian Arctic and the Utah desert to simulate life on Mars. “A culture which is going to Mars is going to be much more adept at furthering its prospects on Earth,” Zubrin says. Zubrin is bullish on exploration, but says he “doesn’t see merit” in the concept of colonizing Mars to ensure that at least some humans would live on after a catastrophe on Earth like a massive asteroid strike. That said, Zubrin expects “Mars will be a pressure cooker for innovation because you have to adapt.” By exploring Mars, scientists and engineers could uncover new technologies to deflect asteroids and also improve medicine or grow more productive crops on Earth. “By becoming a spacefaring species we will gain greater control over our environment, which is essential to our long-term survival,” he says. If colonization were to be attempted, how might that work? A future where millions of humans live on Mars is central to the story of “The Expanse,” a TV show on the Syfy Channel inspired by novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Abraham says logistics would be a challenge to making this fantasy a reality. “Moving large populations from one planet to another with present or foreseeable technology is like drinking a lake through a coffee straw,” he says. “The more likely scenario to me is that we make Mars, Venus, Europa or wherever we’re aiming for a habitable, sustainable environment and then build up the population in the traditional way.” Humanity’s need to explore and expand has not always been a positive instinct, Franck says. On the show, the vision of colonization is far from utopian, as an independent Mars government and a crowded Earth are on the brink of war. He and Abraham caution against looking at Mars as an escape from the side of human nature that Hawking fears could threaten life on Earth. “Humanity isn’t likely to change much, whatever context you put us in,” Abraham says. “If the barrier to space exploration is that we have to change human nature first, we’re kind of sabotaging the project at the start, right?”

(Richard, , 7-21)

Moynihan, however, points out that the "go to space, save humanity" argument isn't as strong as the billionaires present it, especially at this particular moment in time. This century, we face myriad existential threats that are not localised and could easily spread, from bioengineered pandemics to misaligned artificial intelligence. It's possible such threats could reach beyond Earth. "Rushing to become multi-planetary might not provide a failsafe against every worst-case risk, says Moynihan. "In the immediate term, sparking a worldwide conversation on the issue of extreme risks may be more cost-effective than sprinting to Mars." And as for climate change? While it is unlikely to be an existential risk, it promises to cause a huge amount of suffering to billions of people in the near-term – and there's not much that space tourism nor a galactic settlement project in the far future will do to help avoid that today. Amid floods, wildfires and heatwaves, there have been plenty of critics of the billionaire era of space travel. Based on the severity of the problems we face, there are some today who might rather abandon visions of galactic settlement altogether – at least in the near-term. That sentiment was captured in a recent essay by the science fiction writer Sim Kern, who pointed out that space may offer the alluring ideal of salvation and starting afresh, but in truth, "there's no leaving our messiness behind, no matter how many light-years away we travel". And in any case, Kern writes, we have a pretty nice orbiting settlement already: "It is enormous, big enough to bring all our friends and family along. It has excellent gravity and radiation shielding in the form of a breathable atmosphere. It comes with a nearly-unlimited renewable energy source – the Sun – which should last us another billion years before it gets too hot and burns us up. "Our spaceship is peopled with more than eight million different alien life forms for us to study, whose behaviours and languages and intelligences we’re only beginning to understand. These other-species friends provide us with air, food, medicines, water filtration – some even sing for us, perfume our air, and make our ship breathtakingly beautiful." If our descendants in the future were to agree, this is known as the "The Bullerby scenario", named after the idyllic rural life of Sweden in children’s books by Astrid Lindgren. It imagines that humanity eventually decides to ignore space, and instead focus on Earth, building a steady-state society with green energy, sustainable agriculture and so on. If intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisations have made this choice too, this could explain why we haven't seen any yet: perhaps they're living the life of Bullerby instead. What about the really long-term though? If we're talking hundreds of thousands of years, then spreading across the Solar System and Milky Way can be taken more seriously as an argument for ensuring the future of humanity. Even those who disagree with starting the project now would be hard-pressed to justify delaying it until the moment before humanity collapses – that would be a disaster of unimaginable scale. The average mammalian species has a 1-million-year lifespan, which suggests that at some point our time will come if we do nothing to prevent it. Catastrophes that could wipe us out are inevitable in deep time. But unlike other animals, we have advanced intelligence, so many researchers believe that taking the "astronomical" path beyond Earth promises a much longer future for our species. If we have settlements all over the galaxy, humanity becomes far more robust. "I'm very fond of not having all the eggs in the same relatively fragile baskets," says Anders Sandberg, also at the University of Oxford. "Space colonies are way more fragile than planets, and vulnerable, but you can build more of them," he says. "Once you're actually able to build some big ones, you're going to be able to build a lot of small ones too. And at this point, that looks like you can reduce risks." I'm very fond of not having all the eggs in the same relatively fragile baskets Moynihan agrees. "It remains true that for humanity to fulfil its longest-term potential, it must eventually reach beyond," he writes. "Earth will ultimately become uninhabitable as our Sun ages. But the wider Universe will remain capable of supporting life – and the richness of consciousness – for aeons beyond this." The trouble is, even in the deep future, there will always be reasons not to start the project. There will always be urgent problems we need to fix, back on Earth. "Becoming multi-planetary is a great vision and a good thing in the long run, but it might never really be a rational thing to do," says Sandberg. "I think there might even be a weird kind of selection for the slightly exuberant and the irrational." He cites the dictum that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man". "It might be that it's actually unreasonable what Bezos or Musk are doing, but it might still be a good thing." (In the long-run, at least.) Whatever you think of the current generation of billionaires – their priorities, personalities, wealth, attitudes towards inequality or climate change, or treatment of their employees – there's no denying that they have made significant progress in space travel in a short space of time. Could it have been left to future generations instead of them? Maybe. But that doesn't make their contributions worthless. Sandberg recalls a conversation with Musk, many years before SpaceX had sent rockets to space and back, when the entrepreneur visited him and colleagues at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. "[He] was literally doing drawings on a napkin at the Grand Cafe here in Oxford to explain to me how he felt he could totally make something way cheaper than what Nasa was doing," recalls Sandberg. "I was nodding and saying 'I hope you're right'. Well, he proved himself." However, Sandberg points out that if humanity does go on to build a galactic civilisation that saves its long-term future, it needn't be built according to the whims and desires of one or two billionaires in the early 21st Century. "If we don't want space to be set by a few particular people's visions, then the rest of us should also make our wishes known," he says. In the long-run, expanding into space could be a humanity-wide project Those who criticise the billionaire generation worry that their visions fail to take account of many present-day concerns, such as social justice and inequality. However, there might be opportunities to integrate some of these issues within space exploration plans. For example, the linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen has long been making the case for integrating astronauts with disabilities within space programmes. This year, the European Space Agency apparently took her advice, putting out a recruitment call for "parastronauts". And while many might wish to focus their energies on climate change and other problems in the near-term, the future generations who are helped by their efforts may well decide to rejoin the space project in the deeper future. After all, it wasn't always the case that the priorities of space explorers and environmentalists were misaligned. The images of the Earth as a "pale blue dot" helped to show what was worth preserving about our planet, and Sandberg points out that without satellites we'd have a much weaker scientific understanding of climate change. In the long-run, expanding into space could be a humanity-wide project, rather than one decided by a handful of people in Silicon Valley. A galactic civilisation may well lie in our future, eventually. Perhaps Bezos's dreams of an O'Neill cylinder will become reality. Perhaps it could help to save our species. But wherever we end up, that future will be shaped by citizens of the Milky Way with their own priorities and desires – and who are living long after the 21st Century's richest men have gone.

(Kelsey, , 10-22)

Cosmologist Martin Rees at Cambridge University just published a book about existential threats to our world. When Vox’s Sean Illing sat down for an interview with him, he asked whether humanity would need to move beyond the Earth to survive. Rees was fine with private companies exploring space, but was emphatically opposed to the idea that colonization could save us: “I think that’s a dangerous delusion because Mars will be a more hostile environment than the top of Everest or the South Pole, and dealing with climate change here on Earth is far more important than terraforming Mars.” That was a recurring theme in my conversations with experts. Earth is in trouble, but space is deeply inhospitable to humans. And even the worst catastrophes are unlikely to leave this world as hostile to humanity as a planet with no life, no atmosphere, limited gravity, and little water. Nothing we find on Mars or the Moon is likely to be our salvation in a disaster. If we want to keep humanity alive, there are better places for Bezos, Musk, and anyone else afraid for the future of our species to spend their money. Trying to pinpoint a scenario where a colony might help Nick Beckstead is a program officer at the Open Philanthropy Project, where he researches threats to the survival of human civilization. It’s his job to think about the worst-case scenarios — both how to prevent them and whether there are any ways to preserve a future for the human race if they come to pass. I asked him whether he thought space colonization might save us. At first he was a bit more upbeat than Rees. “If we had a thriving civilization on another planet, that would be really good news for the future of humanity,” he said. He’s looked into risks like climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, and other potential sources of ecological catastrophe. A healthy, independent Mars colony that didn’t need any supplies from Earth could immunize us from many of those dangers. “If you handed me a Mars colony that was functioning, I’d be pretty excited about that.” But he’s less bullish when considering the prospects of achieving that. “It’s going to be very difficult, very expensive, and probably take a long time,” he said. Not a long time as in decades — which might barely be enough time to get us to Mars in the first place — but a long time as in centuries. Beckstead noted he’d be much more optimistic if a self-sustaining colony were really achievable in a matter of decades, as Musk thinks it is. But as Musk himself admits, timelines aren’t his strong point: Even when his futuristic technology comes together, it tends to take longer than expected. And even Musk doesn’t expect that his colony will be self-sustaining anytime soon. For a space colony to do any good, humanity has to hold itself together for the next several centuries. A lot of Beckstead’s work is on identifying ways for us to do exactly that, so I asked him whether he thought there were faster, more cost-effective approaches to protecting humanity in the event of a worst-case scenario. Say we agree with Elon Musk that we need “enough of a seed of human civilization to bring human civilization back.” It seems like we could achieve that either with a space colony ... or with a bunker in New Zealand. (New Zealand is sometimes mentioned as a location unlikely to be nuked — or made uninhabitable by nuclear winter — in the event of a global nuclear war.) Are there any risks that the Mars colony protects us from that the bunker in New Zealand doesn’t protect us from? Not many. Climate change could turn out vastly more devastating than even our worst-case models — but bad enough to make the Earth less habitable than Mars or the Moon? In the most pessimistic projections, a full nuclear exchange could drop Earth’s temperature down by 17-20 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be utterly catastrophic to life as we knew it ... and still much warmer than Mars or the Moon. Even if a bioengineering disaster managed to destroy literally all life, Earth would still be more habitable for humans than space would. Beckstead, who engages seriously with lots of very strange ideas, called the ones we were airing “a little far-out.” There are other dangers a Mars colony wouldn’t help with at all. Beckstead mentioned risks from advanced artificial intelligence, which is an area Elon Musk has publicly expressed concerns about as well. So I reached out to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to ask whether a Mars colony can protect us from the AI hazards they study. Rob Bensinger, head of research communications there, thought that a Mars colony does nothing to mitigate any of his safety concerns. (Neither does the bunker in New Zealand). He wanted to disabuse me of the notion that AI risk is about computers hijacking our drones to turn on the human race — a scenario where being on another planet might actually make a difference. The risk AI researchers are concerned with is about humanity being outmatched, not about getting into a shooting war. Just like I know I’d lose if I tried to negotiate a business deal with a team of experienced corporate lawyers — even though I don’t know what specific mistake I’d make — he says we’ll lose if we’re trying to negotiate the future of humanity with powerful computer systems we don’t understand. Having more planets won’t help. “Escaping to Mars is in the genre ‘beat Deep Blue at chess,’” Bensinger says — meaning that it only works to manage risks for as long as humanity is more resourceful than AI. Going to Mars might be a fun goal. But keeping us alive requires staying focused on Earth. What I heard from all of them was that, while space colonization is exciting, more resources are needed for risk-mitigation efforts here on Earth. Beckstead, the Open Philanthropy Project program officer, is focused on those. “Given that there are many risks it doesn’t protect us from very well, and given that it’s expensive and going to take a long time ... I see options that are an easier route to success,” said Beckstead. He did, however, want to make sure I knew that he thinks space exploration is a worthy human endeavor — just not particularly high on the list of ways to keep our species alive.

(Sim, , 7-19_

Last weekend, Richard Branson described his bounce up to low-earth orbit as making space “more accessible to all.” It’s laughably ironic for a billionaire to co-opt the language of inclusivity to describe the privatization of space flight. However, mainstream media shared the speech far and wide, largely uncritically, with few journalists pointing out that this carnival ride for the uber-rich was funded with over $200 million dollars in taxpayer subsidies. None that I saw credited Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, the Black feminist astrophysicist whose line Branson reflected, and whose idea of making space accessible to all starts with social justice on earth. With this speech, Branson added to the chorus of billionaires using science fiction fantasies to sell us on their vanity space programs. Jeff Bezos will likely treat us to more high-minded speechifying in advance of his launch on Tuesday. He has described Blue Origin’s mission as necessary to avoid putting a limit on energy usage per capita on Earth. Basically, in order to avoid learning to live sustainably here, we must go up to space so we can keep exploiting the hell out of whatever we find up there. As SpaceX’s Elon Musk has said, “We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species”. Never mind that we’ve found zero evidence of any kind of life on other planets, let alone intelligent life, let alone intelligent life spread across multiple planets; Musk’s rhetoric echoes a commonly-held belief that space colonization is an inevitability, that it’s our destiny. We should be wary when rich people say that colonization is our destiny. That rhetoric sounds awfully similar to Manifest Destiny, which provided greedy men a moral pretense to commit a lot of atrocities. I recently wrote a viral Twitter-thread-turned-essay about the enormous challenges of sustaining life in space, and why we’re not going to see lunar colonies anytime soon. But just because these billionaires won’t succeed in establishing exoplanetary colonies in their lifetimes doesn’t mean their pursuit of them isn’t harmful. Bezos, Branson, and Musk have sold the public on their space programs, and as a result, we’re giving them a lot of our wealth – billions of dollars of taxpayer money and billions in personal investments. What’s more, the global economic system is rigged so that a guy like Bezos can become a hundred-billionaire while profiting off the labor of over a million employees, some working for poverty wages, who piss in bottles to meet quotas and sometimes die at work. Meanwhile, the activities of the corporations that create these billionaires are ravaging the only habitable planet we’ve got. But because our neo-feudal lords have sold us on a science-fiction fantasy, many look up to them as heroes rather than decrying their obscene and ill-gotten wealth. Look, I love science fiction. I’m a sci-fi writer and a lifelong Trekkie. But I’m starting to realize that a public which consumes so much science fiction and so little science fact is dangerous. Just because you watched Matt Damon live on Mars for a year in a movie with convincing graphics doesn’t mean that Elon Musk is on the verge of building a colony there. But when he says he’s going to Mars in six years, there are legions of Musk stans on Twitter who believe him – and his stock soars. One reason we find the fantasy of outer space colonization so irresistible is the prospect of starting afresh. Our global society is enormously complicated, with baked-in bigotries and illogical ways of doing things that seem impossible to untangle here on earth. But on another planet, so we assume, we could start over and get it right this time. Realistically, though, there’s no leaving our messiness behind, no matter how many light-years away we travel. I can’t think of a better illustration for this than the fact that the moon is already a toilet. When people think of what astronauts left behind on the moon, they might picture Buzz Aldrin planting an American flag. But I picture all the literal shit we left up there. NASA, unlike any respectable hiker, didn’t value “packing out waste”. The pooping protocol for Apollo astronauts involved wearing adhesive bags stuck to their asses, which notoriously tore out pubic hairs when removed. They sealed the bag – hoping nothing escaped to float around the lunar module – and crushed an antibacterial capsule inside, mushing it around with their poop to prevent a future biohazard. Then they chucked the bag out the airlock. Over the course of the Apollo missions, we planted five flags on the moon and ninety-six bags of human excrement. We also left a plaque on the Lunar Lander reading, “We came in peace for all mankind” – never mind that at the time, the US was carpet-bombing Vietnam and hitting the kids who lived there with napalm. Anywhere we travel, we’ll be bringing all our shit – literal and figurative – with us. And as any Apollo astronaut can tell you, shit is much easier to deal with on Earth than in space. If you care deeply, as I do, about the long-term goals of space science, it’s imperative to put a stop to the world-eating overconsumption that creates billionaires, rather than indulging their pet projects. For now, the best thing we could do to ensure humanity’s long-term survival in space is to figure out living sustainably here on earth. If you’re a sci-fi lover like me, think of it this way: we are already living on a magnificent spaceship uniquely suited to our needs. It is enormous, big enough to bring all our friends and family along. It has excellent gravity and radiation shielding in the form of a breathable atmosphere. It comes with a nearly-unlimited renewable energy source – the Sun – which should last us another billion years before it gets too hot and burns us up.

(Abby, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/07/19/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-race-abby-maxman , 7-19)

The magic of space exploration is undeniable, as are the advances in science and technology that often come with it. But there is something deeply wrong with our society when three of the wealthiest men on Earth, including Jeff Bezos, spend billions of dollars on an ego-fueled race to space, while the world is reeling from a global pandemic and people on our planet are quite literally starving. A new Oxfam report finds 11 people are likely dying every minute from hunger and malnutrition, outpacing COVID-19 fatalities. This, as Jeff Bezos prepares for his 11-minute thrill ride. Bezos, who takes flight on July 20, is now the wealthiest man on Earth, worth about $200 billion dollars. His wealth could more than address some of the country’s and world’s most pressing problems. How this came to be is not rocket science. It is our backwards and corrupt tax system that has allowed Jeff Bezos to pay next to no federal income tax — even claim the child tax credit one year — while at the same time pour $7.5 billion into his own private aerospace company. Imagine the true heights we could achieve if he, along with other billionaires, paid their fair share of taxes. A recent bombshell IRS leak from ProPublica revealed that America’s 25 richest billionaires — including Bezos — paid only 3% in income tax between 2014 and 2018. Meanwhile the average U.S. worker pays a tax rate of 22%. Here’s the truth: we have built a tax system with inequality at its core, one that deliberately favors the wealthy while squeezing working families who can least afford it. This space race is also an affront to the Amazon workers who struggle to make a living, are denied basic rights like collective bargaining and report being treated like robots, constantly watched to ensure they work every single second, faster and faster. These are the very workers who have helped make Bezos the richest man on Earth. In fact, if Bezos gave each of Amazon’s 1.3 million workers a $65,000 bonus with the profits he made during the pandemic, he would still be left with the $113 billion fortune that he had before the pandemic began. As we grapple with how to control the still-deadly pandemic and pay for a fair and equitable recovery — one that would make desperately needed investments in well-paying jobs, childcare and efforts to combat the climate crisis — we must consider what a fair tax system would look like. If Amazon paid the current U.S. corporate tax rate of 21%, it would pay an additional $2.5 billion in taxes a year — enough to provide food assistance to 1.7 million Americans facing hunger. A 3% wealth tax on Jeff Bezos would generate $6 billion in revenue on his $200 billion fortune, enough to provide high-quality childcare to every child under 4-years-old in Amazon’s home state of Washington — 440,000 kids. A pandemic profits tax, to ensure that companies like Amazon — that profited during the pandemic — are taxed fairly on their windfall gains, would yield $11 billion in additional revenue just from Amazon. That’s enough to vaccinate 580 million people around the world against COVID-19. So where do we go from here? We have a chance to level the playing field in front of us right now. President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan would go a long way to unrigging the rules that have allowed so many corporations and wealthy individuals to get away with paying so little. The American Jobs Plan would raise the corporate tax rate and close offshore tax loopholes. The American Families Plan would raise the marginal rate for those earning more than $400,000, increase the capital gains rate for the wealthiest Americans, and provide much-needed resources to the IRS to make sure tax cheats pay their fair share. No one making less than $400,000 would pay more tax than they do now, and most would pay less. We will never achieve a fair and equitable recovery from COVID-19 if we continue to have a system where corporations and the wealthy get richer while everyone else is left behind. The real innovation we need is not a business plan for space tourism, it is a fair tax system to curb runaway inequality, ensure we reward work, not wealth, and invest in the health, safety and education of people on Earth — our one and only home.

(Dr. Tanya Harrison Professional Martian. PhD Geoscientist at Planet Labs. Former operations team member for Opportunity, https://tanyaofmars.medium.com/its-time-to-reclaim-the-narrative-around-space-from-the-billionaires-5be46b35ffb9)

This morning, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin launched four people into space, including Star Trek’s own Captain Kirk, William Shatner*. While this flight only lasted mere minutes, the impact on Shatner was abundantly clear as soon as he stepped out of the New Shepard crew capsule after touchdown. Bezos walked up to Shatner and asked how the experience was, to which he replied, “In a way, it’s indescribable.” And as he starts to try to articulate what was most unexpected to him… …Bezos turns away, interrupting him to pop a bottle of champagne and cheer. To me, this was such a clear proxy illustration of the disconnect between the idea of the billionaire space race, and what space means to those of us who have chosen it as our life’s passion, our careers. Shatner waited awkwardly for Bezos and others gathered around the capsule to finish spraying champagne before continuing to describe his experience. The impact was obviously profound: He talked about realizing how thin the dividing line between the comfort of Mother Earth and death in the blackness of space really is. “I’m so filled with emotion over what just happened,” he said through tears. His thoughts were rambling yet beautiful as he worked to voice them. “I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it. It’s…it’s so much larger than me, than life. And it hasn’t got anything to do with little green men, and the blue orb, it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that. It has to do with the enormity, and the quickness, and the suddenness of life and death[…]the vulnerability of everything. It’s so small. This air that’s keeping us alive, it’s thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.” These words had me and my space friends tearing up. Multiple group chat messages dinged with people expressing their awe of Shatner’s comments. It’s honestly not a reaction I was not expecting to have at this joyride flight for rich folks into space. But Shatner’s words unintentionally reflect why so many of us working in this sector care about space. Those of us who most certainly aren’t billionaires. We’re not in this for the money, or the prestige, or for our own personal legacy. It’s about understanding that Earth is unique and precious and we should be doing our damndest to protect it and ensure the survival of life on this planet—and potentially expanding beyond for that long-term survival. Satellites orbiting Earth help us monitor the weather, navigate the world, understand climate change, and even protect human rights. Satellites and rovers on other worlds help us put Earth into context in the universe, highlighting just how amazing our planet and the plethora of life in all forms, surviving in nearly every crevice here, truly is. Space has also long provided inspiration for people to see a future where humanity works together as a species. When Star Trek premiered in 1966, it presented an audacious future where gender, race, and even poverty were no longer social issues. Shortly after in 1969, the Apollo 11 Moon landing had folks around the world watching humanity take its first steps on another celestial body—something many probably never imagined would happen in their lifetimes. In interviewing people from around the world who watched the Moon landing live on television, or listened to it on the radio, for my book For All Humankind, the consistent message from them all was that they felt like this was a human achievement rather than simply an American one. They didn’t care about the politics of the Space Race. With no ties to the space industry, or even America at all, folks felt like this was a moment in history of which they were a part. This is the attitude around space we need to reclaim: The true desire to build a better future. The desire to understand, respect, and care for our home planet. We’re all crew members on Spaceship Earth, and as such we should all be personally invested in making sure the ship is running well and its crew is happy and healthy. At its core, that’s what using space to help life on Earth is really about, and why so many of us in the space sector are here. We can’t let the vitriolic narrative around space billionaires overtake this vision. Many of the criticisms around them are valid: They should be paying their fair share of taxes, and they should be treating their employees well, for example. But we need to separate the criticisms of those people and their businesses from the larger ideal of space. Because these few billionaires don’t represent us.

(Matthew R., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/musk-and-bezos-offer-humanity-a-grim-future-in-space-colonies/)

A million inhabitants live in the city under the soft pink sky of Mars, just a century after the first robotic probes from Earth visited the Red Planet. They farm and labor in habitats that shield them from dust and harsh ultraviolet radiation. Promoted as a society unshackled from earthly laws, this town is in fact as unfree as possible. The company rules everything, owning not only the buildings but the water and air people need to survive. If a person took out a loan to pay for passage, the company effectively holds them in indentured servitude. Human rights are not a given, nor is bodily autonomy. Thankfully, this dystopia isn’t inevitable. However, some of the world’s most powerful men believe it’s part of humanity’s multiplanetary future, and as leaders of the private space industry they have the potential to realize much of the vision. For years, SpaceX chief Elon Musk has pushed claims that he will resettle a million people on Mars by 2050 using a thousand rockets built by his company, with the first settlers arriving by the end of this decade. Even sooner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company is plotting to build an “office park” in low-Earth orbit in the next five years called the Orbital Reef. His ultimate vision, however, is trillions of people in space colony canisters, to produce “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” in his questionable phrasing, in coming centuries. NASA has now granted contracts to both Bezos and Musk to build landing craft that will carry astronauts to the moon in this decade to help build a planned lunar base. Given their grim vision for humanity’s off-world tomorrows, we should dread plutocrats controlling any aspect of our future. Of course, space exploration has never been wholly innocent. The “space race” of the 1960s, including the Apollo program, largely aimed at triumphing over the Soviet Union. The space shuttle carried out military missions. NASA’s current Artemis agenda—particularly as originally formulated under the Trump administration—is as much about reasserting American superiority in space, and providing access for private companies to the moon’s natural resources, as it is about advancing science. For Musk, other planets seem like an opportunity to leave laws behind. “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities,” says SpaceX’s satellite Internet Starlink company, in its terms of service. That language is revealing: First, Starlink doesn’t serve Mars yet and may never, but more importantly the statement is not true—all activity on other worlds is governed by an appropriate nation, in accordance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. However, any Earth-bound government would have difficulty enforcing laws on a permanent Mars settlement, where the only recourse might be stopping supply missions, a drastic measure that could kill the entire colony. Even sanctioning the company back home wouldn’t stop problems on another planet, especially if SpaceX owns the rockets to get there. Musk and his companies don’t have the greatest track record following the law on Earth, which doesn’t speak well to how he would govern a Mars colony. His Martian employees can look forward to “burning the 3 A.M. oil, they won’t even leave the factory,” a regimen for which he has lauded Chinese workers; Musk has demanded intensive workweeks from Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter employees, at least one of whom (later fired) tweeted about sleeping on her office floor. He also has used Mars settlement as an example of why he’s concerned about declining birthrates (a fixation of white supremacists for more than a century). That’s all troubling because Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla have faced scrutiny over allegations of racial and sexual harassment, and of multiple safety violations. SpaceX also reportedly paid an employee a settlement after she reported Musk offering a horse in exchange for sexual favors. Since Musk took the reins at Twitter, the social media platform has stepped up censorship on behalf of regimes including Turkey and India, and welcomed white supremacists back, while the new owner himself praised brutal historical dictators and spread antisemitic memes. These behaviors are troubling enough in a CEO, but they’re alarming in the leader of a space colony. Tech billionaires in general appear fond of writing their own rules while rejecting others’ legal authority, and Bezos is no exception. His Blue Origin rocket firm, as mentioned, also won a contract from NASA to construct the lunar lander for the Artemis project, which in addition to establishing a permanent human presence will open the moon to mining. Slated as a private replacement for the International Space Station, one of Orbital Reef’s perks is its freedom from government oversight, which in light of the many labor issues at Amazon should give anyone pause. To put it bluntly: if our space overlords behave this way on Earth with governments looking over their shoulders, how will they behave off-world with little possibility of oversight or redress? Even returning to Earth from Mars might be technically impossible. Trusting your life to private space companies is a big gamble, not least since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May signed a bill shielding SpaceX and other companies from liability from death or injury incurred from spaceflight. One of the earliest popularizations of orbiting space habitats and Mars colonies came from the engineer Wernher von Braun, whose personal history should make us cautious about space visionaries. He arrived in the United States in secret, smuggled by the U.S. government to build rockets as he had for his previous employer: the Nazi regime, which he served as a member of the party and a high-ranking officer in the SS. During World War II, he oversaw the construction of the V-2 missiles that bombarded England. While he personally claimed to be apolitical, more people died in the forced-labor camps building the rockets than in the bombardments. Musk and Bezos don’t serve a fascist regime, but like von Braun, their visions are rooted in 20th-century colonialism, resource extraction and disregard for labor rights. Martian company towns off-world won’t be the libertarian paradise promised by our tech billionaires.

(Paris Marx is a freelance writer, host of left-wing tech podcast Tech Won't Save Us, and editor of Radical Urbanist. , 6-8)

The May 30 launch symbolized both Trump’s desire to project an image of revived American greatness and Musk’s need not only to bolster the myth that makes his wealth possible, but to set the foundations for a privatized space industry. The space billionaires — Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos foremost among them — have little stake in the well-being of the majority of the population. Their space visions are designed for wealthy people like themselves, with little mention of where the working class would fit in. They’ve built their wealth on exploitation, and their visions of the future are little more than an extension of their present actions. A History of Violence The business practices of Musk and Bezos are increasingly well known and have been on clear display during the pandemic. Musk tried to claim Tesla’s Fremont, California factory was “essential” until authorities forced him to close it; then he reopened it in defiance of health orders. As Tesla CEO, Musk has a long history of opposing the unionization of workers, presiding over a high rate of worker injuries (which the company tried to cover up), and even having a former worker hacked and harassed after he became a whistleblower. Meanwhile, Bezos has a similar history of abusing Amazon workers. Amazon’s warehouses are known for having higher injury rates than the industry average, the company has fought unionization, and the stories of the terrible conditions experienced by workers are legendary. During the pandemic, that has continued, with the company failing to enforce social distancing or provide adequate protective equipment until workers began walking out, refusing to be open about infection information, and firing workers who dared criticize the company, all while Bezos’s wealth has increased by more than $30 billion. But it goes beyond that, because the worldviews of these billionaires began to be formed long before they started the empires they currently lord over. Musk did not have a regular childhood, but rather a wealthy upbringing in apartheid South Africa. His father was an engineer and owned part of an emerald mine in Zambia, telling Business Insider, “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe.” In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk got money from his father when he was starting one of his original ventures. He also had a particular admiration for his grandfather, who moved to apartheid South Africa from Canada after rallying “against government interference in the lives of individuals.” Bezos has a not dissimilar story. His father was a well-off oil engineer in Cuba while Fulgencio Batista was in power. In Bit Tyrants, Rob Larson explains that Bezos’s father left the island after the Cuban Revolution and passed his libertarian views down to his son. Bezos’s parents invested nearly $250,000 in Amazon in 1995 as it was getting started. These space barons made their billions through the exploitation of their workers and came from well-off backgrounds made possible from resource extraction. When digging into their visions for a future in space, it’s clear that they seek to extend these conditions into the cosmos, not challenge them in favor of space exploration for the benefit of all. The Future They Want Musk and Bezos are the leading drivers of the modern push to privatize and colonize space through their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin. Their visions differ slightly, with Musk preferring to colonize Mars, while Bezos has more interest in building space colonies in orbit. In 2016, Musk claimed he would begin sending rockets to Mars in 2018. That never happened, but it hasn’t ended his obsession. Musk is determined to make humans a multi-planetary species, framing our choice as either space colonization or the risk of extinction. Bezos says that Earth is the best planet in our solar system, but if we don’t colonize space we doom ourselves to “stasis and rationing.” These framings serve the interests of these billionaires, and make it seem like colonizing space is an obvious and necessary choice when it isn’t. It ignores their personal culpability and the role of the capitalist system they seek to reproduce in causing the problems they say we need to flee in the first place. Billionaires have a much greater carbon footprint than ordinary people, with Musk flying his private jet all around the world as he claims to be an environmental champion. Amazon, meanwhile, is courting oil and gas companies with cloud services to make their business more efficient, and Tesla is selling a false vision of sustainability that purposely serves people like Musk, all while capitalism continues to drive the climate system toward the cliff edge. Colonizing space will not save us from billionaire-fueled climate dystopia. But these billionaires do not hide who would be served by their futures. Musk has given many figures for the cost of a ticket to Mars, but they’re never cheap. He told Vance the tickets would cost $500,000 to $1 million, a price at which he thinks “it’s highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony.” However, the workers for such a colony clearly won’t be able to buy their own way. Rather, Musk tweeted a plan for Martian indentured servitude where workers would take on loans to pay for their tickets and pay them off later because “There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!” Bezos is even more open about how the workforce will have to expand to serve his vision, but has little to say about what they’ll be doing. His plan to maintain economic “growth and dynamism” requires the human population to grow to a trillion people. He claims this would create “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins” who would live in space colonies that are supposed to house a million people each, with the surface of Earth being mainly for tourism. Meanwhile, industrial and mining work would move into orbit so as not to pollute the planet, and while he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge it, it’s likely that’s where you’ll find many of those trillion workers toiling for their space overlord and his descendants. Space Shouldn’t Serve Capitalists In 1978, Murray Bookchin skewered a certain brand of futurism that sought to “extend the present into the future” and desired “multinational corporations to become multi-cosmic corporations.” Much of this future thinking obsesses about possible changes to technology, but seeks to preserve the existing social and economic relations — “the present as it exists today, projected, one hundred years from now,” as Bookchin put it. That’s at the core of the space billionaires’ vision for the future. Space has been used by past US presidents to bolster American power and influence, but it was largely accepted that capitalism ended at the edge of the atmosphere. That’s no longer the case, and just as past capitalist expansions have come at the expense of poor and working people to enrich a small elite, so too will this one. Bezos and Trump may have a public feud, but that doesn’t mean that their mutual interest isn’t served by a renewed US push into space that funnels massive public funds into private pockets and seeks to open celestial bodies to capitalist resource extraction. This is not to say that we need to halt space exploration. The collective interest of humanity is served by learning more about the solar system and the universe beyond, but the goal of such missions must be driven by gaining scientific knowledge and enhancing global cooperation, not nationalism and profit-making. Yet that’s exactly what the space billionaires and American authoritarians have found common cause in, with Trump declaring that “a new age of American ambition has now begun” at a NASA press briefing just hours before cities across the country were placed under curfew last week. Before space can be explored in a way that benefits all of humankind, existing social relations must be transformed, not extended into the stars as part of a new colonial project.

(Sim,Sim Kern is a Gulf Coast journalist and speculative fiction writer, exploring intersections of climate change, identity, and social justice , 7-7)

And what about Musk's dream of a colony on Mars, or at least the Moon? Those are astronomically less feasible. The farther away from Earth you're trying to sustain life in space, the harder it gets. And while they have the benefit of gravity, the surface of the Moon and Mars are covered with a powdery regolith that gums up mechanisms. NASA is currently working on sending astronauts to live on the Moon as part of the Artemis mission. They've been working on Artemis plans for years and will continue to plan for years more before sending the first crew to sleep on the Moon — for a week or two, max. No, there will be no Moon-a-Lago, let alone a Mars-a-Lago, in our lifetimes. So despite Musk's lofty claims of making humanity "a multi-planetary species," that's way, way beyond the realm of current technical possibility. And his claim is especially absurd, considering that in order to generate the wealth that sustains billionaires like Musk, we're rapidly destroying the one planet we can live on — Earth. If we don't reverse the environmental and societal degradation caused by global capitalism, the ISS may turn out to be the pinnacle of human space exploration. Advertisement: So when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons. Branson and Bezos aren't investing their money to forward science or expand the bounds of human possibility. They're doing it to be the first rich guy to bounce around uselessly up there, as opposed to NASA astronauts who, again, do science. And after they bounce around uselessly, they're hoping to swindle more of their obscenely rich friends into doing the same. The pointlessness of it all is especially despicable when you understand that space tourism is funded with the hoarded wealth of billions of workers who are struggling to survive here on Earth. The space tourism industry will be built with the profits off supply chains that work people to death-by-exhaustion, literally enslave people, and are rapidly destroying the future habitability of our planet. That's a pretty bleak dystopia. We should really consider taking our wealth back from billionaires before they build it. But if we fail, join me in enjoying the schadenfreude. Space tourism will inevitably suck. Our billionaires won't find anything up there but a whole lot of time to sit with the gaping void in their hearts, which space certainly won't fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they're constipated as hell from astronaut food. The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the people most responsible. But at least they will not be able to escape to some other, better place. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.

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WASHINGTON - In response to Jeff Bezos’ scheduled space flight, Robbie Silverman, Senior Advocacy Manager for Oxfam America made the following statement: “Jeff Bezos’ 11-minute thrill ride to space is an insult to the millions of people here on planet Earth who struggle every day to feed their families and make ends meet. Many of them are the very Amazon workers who helped make Bezos the richest man in the world. We can’t forget that our backwards and corrupt tax system has allowed the same person who pays next to no federal income tax to blow $7.5 billion on his own private aerospace company. “This is truly not rocket science. While hard working American families pay an average of 14% income tax each year, Bezos and the other billionaires in this obscene race to space should be required to pay their fair share. “Congress can and must unrig the rules by increasing the corporate tax rate, closing loopholes that enable corporations to abuse tax havens, increasing the capital gains rate for the wealthiest Americans and raising the marginal tax rate for those earning more than $400,000—all proposals included in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan. Additionally, introducing a 3% wealth tax would generate $6 billion in revenue from Bezos’ $200 billion fortune alone, enough to provide childcare to every child under 4 in his home state of Washington. “The real innovation we need is a fair tax system that would allow desperately needed investments into well-paying jobs, adequate care for our children, and efforts to save the planet we all live on from the climate crisis.”