More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

“Elon Musk’s plans for Mars do involve more than just dying there. Going to Mars “enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth,” he says, like asteroids, nuclear war, or rogue AI. 60 Or, as he put it on Twitter, “We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets.” 61 His preferred plan for doing so involves getting people to Mars—at first a few, and then a lot, with the ultimate plan of sending a million people there by 2050.62 As of this writing, he says he plans to land a SpaceX rocket on Mars by 2029.63 While taking Musk seriously is increasingly difficult—it seems likely that he’ll say and do many bizarre or hurtful things in the months between the writing and publishing of this book—he still has enormous power and influence, and SpaceX is certainly a serious company, at least for now. It is the sole provider of crewed launches on US soil for NASA (as of 2024), its Starlink system is one of the few options for cell service in many truly remote areas, and future versions of SpaceX’s existing Starship launch vehicles could, theoretically, go to Mars. A SpaceX rocket even launched a Tesla out past Mars’s orbit in 2018. Musk’s timeline for Mars is probably too optimistic—over the years he’s given many other dates for boots on Mars and uncrewed landings, and missed them all—but a SpaceX rocket landing on Mars at some point in the next few decades seems like a reasonable possibility. 64 The problem is everything else in Musk’s vision. Space—Mars or otherwise—just isn’t the place. Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities—not now, not soon, and maybe not ever. Consider Mars. It’s fifty-six million kilometers (thirty-five million miles) away at its closest. The most reasonable path there—the route nearly every Mars probe and lander has ever taken—requires about six to nine months in deep space before arriving in orbit around the Red Planet. That’s a long time, longer than all but a few humans have ever spent in space, and far longer than anyone has ever spent beyond low Earth orbit. There’s a good reason for that: venturing beyond low Earth orbit exposes you to massive amounts of dangerous radiation from the Sun (and a smaller amount from deep space). The Sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees in its core. That blistering nuclear heat eventually makes its way to the surface and atmosphere of the Sun, producing visible light, ultraviolet rays, and other kinds of radiation with even higher energies, like x-rays and fast-moving charged particles. There are also cosmic rays, high-energy radiation produced by violent events beyond our solar system. Here on the surface of the Earth, we’re protected from much of this radiation by two mechanisms. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects a large amount of the incoming radiation, and our atmosphere absorbs a good deal of the rest before it arrives at the ground. In low Earth orbit, astronauts lack the protection of our atmosphere, and they can see the results: many astronauts have reported seeing occasional bright flashes in the darkness behind their closed eyelids, produced when high-energy radiation slams into their eyes and optic nerves. But such astronauts still have the protection of Earth’s magnetic field. Not so if they’re on their way to Mars. Astronauts heading into deep space beyond Earth’s orbit invariably receive high doses of background radiation. The Apollo astronauts each received about 0.4 rads, roughly the equivalent of two head CT scans, in the course of their weeklong trips to the Moon. 65 A trip to Mars would be dozens of times longer than that even if it were just one-way. And if a major solar storm hit the spacecraft on its way out, the crew could be exposed to far greater radiation levels than anything the Apollo astronauts experienced. It is possible to shield spacecraft against radiation, but only to a point. Shielding is heavy, which makes it harder to launch the vehicle in the first place. And even heavy shielding can’t stop all forms of radiation from getting through over the course of an eighteen-month round-trip journey through deep space. Bad as it is, radiation is far from the only problem on the journey to Mars. Nine months in close quarters is psychologically taxing even for highly trained astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS)—and they get crew rotations, regular supplies, and real-time communication with the ground. None of that would be possible on a rocket traveling to Mars, which can be up to twenty light-minutes away. Proximity also has other benefits. If anything goes wrong on the ISS, the astronauts can evacuate and be home in a few hours. The astronauts on Apollo 13 only had to wait an excruciating three-and-a-half days before returning home in their crippled spacecraft. On a Mars mission gone awry, help would be months away—or more than a year. Part of the problem is the distance involved, but the orbital mechanics are also difficult. Unlike trips to low Earth orbit or the Moon, Mars launches are only undertaken at certain times, when the two planets are in the right positions relative to each other. That means no rescue in a reasonable amount of time would be possible for a Mars mission in trouble. Even if nothing goes wrong, there’s the dangers of the zero-gravity environment within the spacecraft itself: extended time in zero-g leads to muscle atrophy, bone-density loss, and a variety of other physical ailments. Astronauts coming from extended stays on the ISS have help readjusting to gravity on their return to Earth. But a weakened crew arriving on Mars would have to adapt to gravity without anybody else’s help. Assuming that our intrepid astronauts do make it to Mars in one piece—perhaps with a significantly higher risk of cancer for the rest of their lives, but fine for now—their problems aren’t over. Their radiation exposure isn’t even over. The surface of Mars receives about as much radiation as nearby points in deep space, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field and has barely any atmosphere, just 1 percent of Earth’s. The best way to shield yourself from radiation on the surface would be to dig underground, using the Martian rocks and dust to absorb the radiation streaming down from above. But that presents another issue: Martian dust is rich in perchlorates and other toxic chemicals, making it quite poisonous to humans and many other plants and animals of Earth. The good news there is that you’d have to wear an airtight suit even if the dust weren’t dangerous. With such low air pressure, astronauts on the Martian surface would have to wear full space suits at all times. Direct exposure to Martian air would boil the saliva off an astronaut’s tongue while they asphyxiate; toxic dust would be the least of their concerns. (Although, that toxic dust also has a nasty habit of getting into the Martian air. There are massive dust storms on Mars with alarming regularity, with wind speeds of up to 100 kph [60 mph]. Because the atmosphere is so thin, the storms wouldn’t knock astronauts off their feet—The Martian is fiction in more ways than one—but they would make it even harder to avoid the dust.) Space suits would also help protect astronauts from the cold climate on Mars, though compared to the other problems we’ve seen thus far, this isn’t so extreme: the average temperatures near the Martian equator typically range from 0 ° C (32 ° F) to-70 ° C (-94 ° F). 66 So a balmy day on Mars is comparable to a brisk one on Earth, but a brisk day on Mars is as cold as the Antarctic night. And at the Martian poles, it gets far colder than any air temperature ever recorded on Earth, even in Antarctica. These problems are formidable enough. But if you want to live on Mars, rather than just visit for a while, then you have even more problems to handle. Staying on Mars means finding a good source of water, and Mars doesn’t really have that. The whole planet is a desert, and its scarce water is contaminated with poisonous dust and other hazardous compounds. Once you obtain that water, you’ll need to use it to create a closed ecosystem—probably underground, both for radiation shielding and because that’s where much of the water is. That closed ecosystem would need to have plants and microbes (and maybe insects) in order to provide you with the oxygen and food you need to stay alive. In theory, this should work. In practice, nobody has ever done this successfully on a human scale. The highest-profile attempt to create a closed ecosystem with humans in it, Biosphere 2 outside of Tucson, Arizona, had a troubled first mission—oxygen levels dropped steadily over the two years of the experiment—and a second and final mission that ended prematurely. Human factors contributed to the problems there (including the involvement of one Steve Bannon), but it’s clear that properly balancing out an entirely isolated ecosystem is a difficult thing to do. 67 It would be even harder on Mars, where there’s virtually no oxygen in the air, less than half as much sunlight, and no soil. This all presumes that it’s even possible to get the plants and microbes needed for a closed ecosystem to grow properly in Martian gravity, a third of Earth’s. That might be a problem for the humans living there too. We know what extended exposure to zero-g does to humans, and it’s not good. We don’t know what extended low-g does to humans; ultimately, there’s no good way to be sure without conducting highly unethical experiments on humans. And those experiments would look tame compared to the ones you’d need to perform to know whether it’s safe to have a family on Mars. We don’t know what effects living in a low-g environment would have on pregnant people and kids. It’s an open question: it could be fine, it could dramatically shorten their lifespans, or it could kill them. If it’s not fine, the only way around it would be to construct an underground centrifuge on Mars large enough for pregnant people to live in until they give birth, and for children to live in until they grow up. A centrifuge for full-g exercise is a good idea, but would it really be reasonable to condemn pregnant people to live inside of it 24-7 for nine months? Would we leave children in there for twenty years? What would that do to them? Elton John was right: Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, at least not without information that we can’t get without performing truly horrifying experiments on children. Without that information, raising children off-world seems unethically risky. But merely living on Mars and raising a family there isn’t enough to realize Musk’s dream. He wants a settlement on Mars to be a backup for humanity. That doesn’t just mean a few families, or even a few dozen. If a Mars settlement is going to be a contingency plan for our species in case of a disaster here on Earth, it would need to be fully self-sufficient—as Musk has repeatedly emphasized himself. 68 To do that, you’d need a lot of people. One reason is genetic diversity: in order to prevent dangerous levels of inbreeding and genetic drift among any completely isolated group of people, there would need to be a population of at least a few thousand to start. But self-sufficiency on Mars would require a far larger population than that, because of the technology required to live there. An isolated group of people on Earth can survive with a fairly rudimentary level of technology, as humans did for millennia before the Industrial Revolution and tens of millennia before the development of agriculture. But on Mars, anything but a high-tech society is an instant death sentence. Creating and maintaining the panoply of advanced technology that our society runs on requires a large number of people even here on Earth; Mars wouldn’t need less. So how many people would Mars need for a truly self-sufficient settlement? “One million is actually an absurdly low number of people—far too few to support a modern economy,” writes Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, in response to Musk’s plans for Mars. “Musk’s comments immediately called to mind for me a great essay by one of my favorite science fiction writers, Charlie Stross, that posed precisely this question: ‘What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?’” Stross had written on the subject in 2010, concluding that “colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.” “If anything, that’s on the low side,” writes Krugman. Stross agreed—he suggested that the real figure could be as high as a billion people. 69 (Automation won’t solve the problem. You still need people to build and maintain the machines, and the economic base needed for a high-tech society would still be large.) Musk’s goal of a million people on Mars is unrealistic enough. It’s difficult to see how a billion people could live there, and that’s ignoring questions of how you’d get that many people off of Earth in the first place. Taking just a million people to Mars would require a rocket launch with a hundred people on it every day for thirty years. And about 1 percent of rocket launches fail, so without serious improvements to the technology, roughly ten thousand people would be killed along the way, sacrificed to the dreams of a billionaire.” 

 — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker https://a.co/08hv6WTJ