Musk’s Mars or Bust Sleight of Hand
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for Elon Musk. Musk’s personal inhumanity is reason enough to deny him the power that would come with a Trump presidency, but it’s more urgent than that.
Musk is fixated on colonizing Mars, but that technology is a long way off, and he knows it. Musk is more immediately focused on the satellite launch agreements and defense contracts that would continue to flow freely to SpaceX, scrutiny free, during a presidency he would have helped Trump secure. The expected quid pro quo is out in the open for all to see — if we ignore Musk’s campaign antics and distracting sideshow about colonizing Mars anytime soon. Similarly, billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon, The Washington Post, and Blue Origin infamously exerted pressure on the editorial section of the Post to quash their endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Reportedly, Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, garnered a meeting with Trump in exchange for the pulled endorsement of Trump’s rival. Bezos may have been a teenage reader of 1950s science fiction who became fixated on Mars. Like many hyper-focused people, he is likely seeking to make a childhood dream a reality and is not particular about who he has to appease or harm to do it.
We see clearly that Musk is not the only one out for himself in the aerospace space, but he has another mission as well; undoubtedly, he intends to profit off the weakening of the dollar the launch of a BRICS currency, which Putin supports, would cause. That’s likely what he talks to Putin about weekly as the Russian dictator executes his strategy of greater global domination. Does anyone think that Putin gives a flying eff about Mars? Putin wants to rule this planet. The flex is wielding power here, not in a struggling intergalactic civilization in the cold hardships of space. Earth is the jewel in the cosmos he wants to rule, and Musk is selling us all out to help him, while furthering his own ends. Musk has warned of the coming pain should his preferred candidate, Trump, win the presidential election.
Imagine the Earth ruled by BRICS members Putin and Xi, and Musk (via Trump). These are all ruthless men with little demonstrable regard for humanity. Musk forces campaign canvassers to ride around in the back of an unsafe U-Haul and threatens to strand them far from home if they don’t meet his quotas. Putin dispatches his troops to kill and conquer people in Ukraine. Are Putin and Musk talking about Mars? No. Musk’s show-and-tell is to preoccupy the American public via its long fascination with the Red Planet, perhaps inspired by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, or sci-fi character Delos D. Harriman, a space-obsessed businessman who dies on the Moon in Robert Heinlein’s Requiem.
At a recent tech conference, technologist X posited that we are living in the imagination of Isaac Asimov, who wrote I, Robot and the Foundation trilogy, which are set in a future of intergalactic empire. (Asimov, too, was writing in the 1950s.) The influence of Bradbury, Clarke, and Heinlein, however, seems more relevant to Musk’s and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Mars fixation. They and their teenage contemporaries, who are now shaping the world we all inhabit, undoubtedly read or were culturally influenced by these three and others.
These visionary writers inspired a generation of Americans who read their novels as teenagers and harbor the idea that a civilization may have once existed on Mars, humans can terra form the planet to make it habitable for our species, and colonizing Mars is a reasonable way to respond to overpopulation and resource depletion on Earth.
Ultimately, however, we can’t run away from ourselves and our flawed nature. When I read those books at the same time those teenage boys were reading them years ago, I was struck by the repeating themes of ruthless ambition, violence, and yearning.
When William Shatner, who portrayed the legendary Captain Kirk on Star Trek, made it to the edge of space, the yearning overcame him. “To see the blue color [of the atmosphere] shoot by like that. Down there is mother, comfort — and up there is death. Is that what death is? It is so moving. I never expected it.”
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was right to show us that it is our humanity we can’t escape, and our humanity is what we must tend if we are to survive — on Earth or, eventually, elsewhere. The billionaire boys’ futuristic fantasies cannot be permitted to dictate or disregard the lives we all live. They are not humane or responsible enough for that privilege. Space exploration should be about more than exploitation, and Americans who would sell out the rest of us for glory and greed should not have free reign. — Anneliese M. Bruner
