The Mars Card: Elon Musk's Free Pass to Do Whatever He Wants
A deep dive into Elon's comprehensive self-justification: making humans a "multiplanetary species"
(Photoshop by Mark Balane)
NOTE: This is a long essay that you can’t possibly finish in the email app on your phone. I suggest bookmarking the substack url and reading it later, or adding it to a reader app like Instapaper. It’ll be worth it, I swear!
One day in the distant future, when human civilization spans many planets, perhaps our descendants will look back on the era of early space exploration and be puzzled by a stretch of time in the late 20th century when many Earth governments seemed to lose interest in space travel. Perhaps they’ll note that only the effort of an eccentric South African-born American risk-taker, working in the private sector, could inspire humanity to get back on the horse and regain its sense of adventure.
The South African guy I’m talking about is, of course, Mike Melvill, the pilot of the first private sector suborbital space flight in 2004. But naturally, a lot of the credit will also go to the tech billionaire who funded that flight. Obviously I mean the late Paul Allen. But perhaps future humans will also include a footnote about another South African guy named Elon Musk, founder of a rocket company funded largely by delivering weapons for the United States military, who once stranded a bunch of colonists on a dead rock called Mars.
I found Liftoff, a new book about SpaceX by Eric Berger, a reporter I admire a lot, to be a more substantive piece of Elon Musk merchandise than the biography/hagiography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. It’s about the early days of SpaceX, and it goes into great detail about the many non-Musk individuals who helped create Elon Musk’s rockets. But both books stop short of disrupting Musk’s primary narrative about himself: basically that Elon Musk is just a plucky nerd who nerded his way into a hundred billion nerd bucks on his way to becoming the savior of humanity, LOL!
In Liftoff, Berger uncritically repeats one of Musk’s signature phrases again and again: that Musk’s primary goal in life is to make humans a “multiplanetary species.” Musk, Berger writes toward the end of the book, “remains the same passionate, nerdy, driven person who founded SpaceX to make humans a multiplanetary species.” It’s a phrase Elon Musk seems to have started using during the inception of SpaceX, sometime around 2001 according to the Vance book, to curry favor among his fellow influential space nerds like engineer Jim Cantrell, whose credibility Musk needed to borrow in order to get SpaceX going. Musk even wrote a long piece of commentary for the publication New Space in 2017 called "Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species” (more on which later). He whipped out the phrase most recently on Thursday of last week in a conversation with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis.
Thanks to Musk, the phrase “multiplanetary species” has undergone an unseemly evolution over the last couple decades. It could once be used to evoke a Star Trek-like vision of humanity as a cooperative species, as opposed to a collection of factions in competition with one another. For instance, in 2005, when an international relations professor named Jonathan Fuller Galloway decried “win-lose and lose-lose” dynamics in a report for The International Academy of Astronautics and The European Space Agency, he speculated that “non-zero-sumness will arrive when humanity becomes a multiplanetary species and when we recognize ourselves as one people rather than conflictual subsets of our species.” Instead, the perceived imperative to colonize another planet is now little more than an excuse Elon Musk uses when someone criticizes him. He apparently sees himself as the protagonist of humanity’s Martian mission, so everyone, he seems to think, should get the fuck out of his way.
He’s playing the Mars Card, if you will.
Back in March, Bernie Sanders criticized some billionaires for being wealthy (which is a little like saying “Back in March, some ducks went ‘quack quack’”), tweeting that the combined wealth of Jeff Bezos and Elon musk is greater than that of the bottom 40 percent of Americans. “That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable,” Sanders opined. But Musk had the Mars Card ready to go: “I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” he tweeted.
Musk also played the Mars Card to dunk on a critic of Tesla’s worker-to-CEO pay ratio in 2018. He used it to address worries from European economic ministers about the dominance of SpaceX rockets over the market for satellite launches. In January of this year, when FAA regulators cried foul after a SpaceX test launch operation allegedly included actions the federal government hadn’t signed off on, he tweeted that the FAA’s space division has a “fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” and claimed that, “Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”
In one telling example from last year, Musk seemed to imply that his Mars mission shouldn’t just make him universally tolerated, but universally beloved. Someone on Twitter (the tweet is now deleted) implied that Musk might have ties to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and a fan tweeted that such attacks are from people who, “don't care about this issue, they just hate elon.” Musk himself replied, “Yeah, but why? I’m working on sustainable energy cars & solar that help Earth and making life multiplanetary, to ensure its continuance, with SpaceX.”
As far as I can tell “multiplanetary” first mutated from a convenient buzzword to a comprehensive self-justification in a 2016 keynote Musk gave at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara. “I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets, except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary,” Musk told an adoring crowd.
But trying to appear, however superficially, as if he actually believes he doesn’t “have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets” than going to Mars, seems to be heightening the contradictions inherent in being Elon Musk. For instance, he doesn’t own a house anymore. Instead, he supposedly sleeps at Tesla factories. This is after he promised last year that he would sell all his homes as part of a plan to rid himself of physical possessions. Now Musk claims that he curls up under his desk at a factory and sleeps on the floor, literally, according to an interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal. This, he says, is so we’ll all know he’s “serious” about the whole Mars thing. “It's not about personal consumption. Because people will attack me and say, oh, he's got all these possessions. He's got all these houses. OK, now I don't have them anymore."
But Musk is not “serious.” He may not have pulled a Michael Jackson and built his own private amusement park, but the whole world is Elon Musk’s amusement park. Elon Musk enjoys being a celebrity. He claims to be an avid gamer. He enjoys dank memes. He dabbles in weed. He loves anime. Homeowner or not, if he’s ever tossing and turning under his sleep desk, doing differential calculus or whatever he claims to do with his spare time, he could, if he felt inclined, hop into one of the luxurious private jets he owns—he loves them, and uses them for trips as short as 20 miles—and travel to the home of his pop star girlfriend, Grimes, a self-appointed authority on sleep who presumably owns a bed he could sleep in. After landing at the nearest airstrip to her house, he could drive the rest of the way there in, say, the car James Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me, which he still owns. If Musk didn’t feel like sleeping, he and Grimes could fly anywhere they wanted, and, say, hang out late eating Texas barbecue with some of his famous pals like Dave Chapelle, Joe Rogan, and Kanye West.
In my humble opinion, Elon Musk’s love of fun, treats, and hanging out with people who make him feel important and cool, is normal and and is not some sort of moral failure. Dish Network billionaire Charlie Ergen cultivates an image of boomer dad frugality by bringing a sack lunch to work every day, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter basically wears hair shirts. These extremely rich men are being ridiulous by pretending to not enjoy being rich, and it’s nice that Elon Musk doesn’t usually do this, which makes it all the more ridiculous that he thinks his critics are owned because he sold all his houses.
I’m not saying space travel is necessarily unserious. This isn’t an article by one of those misanthropes who thinks humanity doesn’t deserve to colonize other worlds because we, as a species, are bad. Some weird geek nihilists seem to relish the thought of human extinction or total oblivion, but not me. My bias is that I agree with Stephen Hawking, who thought finding a viable non-Earth option for sustaining life should be humanity’s long-term plan.
And when Elon Musk talks about this stuff, he makes some good points, like when he told The New York Times’s Kara Swisher last year that our planet is in danger from collisions with large asteroids, and that beyond that, “eventually the sun’s going to expand and engulf Earth.”
I share these worries, and I wrote about that in my book (which I mention because this newsletter is essentially a marketing scheme for my book. Please buy it). In my research I learned that an impact between earth and an asteroid 1 kilometer or more in diameter—big enough to do about the same estimated damage as a nuclear war—is an event that should happen about once every 600,000 years. That’s further out from today’s date than the day the first homo sapiens was born, and one such impact happened approximately 10-30,000 years ago. Calculating probabilities doesn’t actually give us exact time windows for recurring events, but let’s make things simple and assume the relatively recent impact gives us another 600,000 years until the next impact. That would mean we have a lot of time to figure out how to do the thing from Michael Bay’s Armageddon to protect ourselves from oncoming asteroids. And by “a lot of time” to figure it out, I mean the entire timespan of human civilization so far, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present, times 100.
Similarly, my understanding is that the sun will indeed become a red giant and swallow Earth in, give or take, 5 billion years. But that’s approximately the amount of time from the formation of Earth to the present. Again: not an emergency. Interestingly, Mars will almost certainly be made uninhabitable around this time (assuming it’s ever made habitable), but it might not be swallowed like Earth. Elon Musk probably knows this (he has the same Google as everyone else, and he knows how to use it), and if pressed on it, I assume he would probably say something like, well, by then hopefully our descendants will have long ago left this solar system, and will be able to munch on space popcorn while they watch the destruction of their ancestral home planet from elsewhere in the galaxy. But he doesn’t say that in interviews. He uses Earth’s eventual destruction as one stray ingredient in a sort of we’re-all-doomed-unless-I-save-us anxiety salad.
In his 2017 piece of commentary for the publication New Space, Musk actually acknowledged his fuzzy grasp of the future. He doesn’t use the term “secular eschatology,” a new and somewhat shaky scientific concept involving the scientific study of doomsday, but that’s essentially what he’s talking about here, and he’s painting in the broadest possible strokes. “I think there are really two fundamental paths,” he wrote. “History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event.” And that’s pretty much his entire explanation. The rest of his commentary is basically an ad for SpaceX. It boils down to: We have to get off Earth sometime in the next few hundred thousand-to-5-billion years, so I ipso facto personally need to get our species off Earth right now.
To be fair, Musk has also voiced some more specific, shorter-term preoccupations, but they make no more sense as justifications for moving to Mars. For instance, he told Swisher humanity was running a “crazy climate experiment which could turn out to be extremely bad, and the evidence at this point is overwhelming that it will be bad.” And I very much agree with him (more on this in a minute). He also told Swisher that he’s worried about society declining or collapsing in a general sort of way, and more specifically, he thinks if an A.I. “decides that it needs to go in a particular direction and we’re in the way then it would, [with] no hard feelings, it would just roll over us.” I think that last one’s farfetched, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that it’s a sincere worry, although an A.I. that can wipe humanity out on Earth can surely extend that mission to our Mars base, wouldn’t you think?
The truth about colonizing Mars any time soon is: it’s like rushing to colonize the inside of an active volcano. Building (he claims) 1,000 starships in order to send (he claims) one million people to a base on Mars with 21st century technology doesn’t solve any of humanity’s current problems by any stretch of the imagination. He’s acknowledged that colonists would live a mean existence, clinging desperately to life in a forbidding, lifeless hellscape, dependent on near-constant resource deliveries, and that “a bunch of people will probably die.”
So with that in mind, let’s get back to Musk’s supposed concern about climate change. Elon Musk is now offering a $100 million X Prize to whoever can invent an actual workable carbon capture system that can be used to halt climate change without, say, reforming society significantly, or changing our economic system. I’ll be thrilled if this plan succeeds. But maybe while he’s at it Musk can offer an additional $100 million to whoever can invent a magic lamp with a climate change genie in it. That might work too. Before the Musk X Prize, plenty of people were already working very hard to make carbon capture work, but they were failing, and even if they succeeded, carbon capture is not as good as it seems.
So in terms of making a real dent in the climate problem, Musk’s main contribution is that he’s helping to speed the transition to electric cars. Thanks to his early investment in Tesla, and the fact that the company hired him to be CEO, he’s profiting more than any other individual from this transition, and getting more press attention than any other automotive executive in the process, so it’s not like he’s doing this out of sheer love for humanity.
But what’s more, with things as they currently are, just switching humanity from one type of car engine to another isn’t a big help when it comes to climate. Replacing internal combustion engines with batteries powered by grid energy is a famously incomplete plan for fighting climate change, and it won’t work (per the IPCC’s 2019 climate change report) without an accompanying massive push away from cars as our primary mode of transportation, something Elon Musk is antagonistic toward, saying in 2017, “I think public transport is painful. It sucks.” In spite of Tesla being the company that made him one of the richest people on Earth, he’s less vocal about climate change than he is about space travel, and I think that’s because he knows he’s not actually doing much, if anything, to fix the problem.
So the idea that Mars is supposed to be our plan B for when Earth inevitably becomes unlivable might almost sound like it makes sense, but only if you don’t look into it in any detail at all.
If there were a martian outpost with—let’s be extremely generous to Musk—a million people on it, that would just mean the 0.01 percent of humans struggling to stay alive in Musk City would be dependent, indefinitely, on Earth for resources, which would need to be delivered via Elon Musk’s fleet of rockets, which by the way are big tubes full of exploding fossil fuel, which is not good for climate change. SpaceX’s current goal is to launch a rocket every two weeks at the cost of 4,000 tons of carbon per year according to Global Citizen, but I would guess it would take multiple launches per day to keep a million people—the entire population of Austin, Texas, the city where Elon Musk sleeps under his desk—on life support, given that Mars is both lifeless, and incredibly hostile to life.
Musk is aware of this problem, and I know that because he got into a Twitter fight with Discover Magazine in 2018, after a report came out demonstrating that Mars can’t be terraformed—meaning “made livable,” basically—because it’s too cold to farm outdoors there, and there aren’t enough greenhouse gases on Mars that humans can readily release into the atmosphere with current technology in order to heat it up. Musk claimed that this wouldn’t be a problem because the necessary compounds are present in Mars’ minerals. Musk famously wants to nuke Mars in order to release all those greenhouse gases, and while that’s one idea rooted in a working theory of how one might eventually be able to colonize Mars (the other one is to use a planet-sized mirror to direct extra sunlight at one side), Discover Magazine says the technology Musk needs is “centuries away from being even remotely possible.”
To make matters worse, the soil on Mars is worthless for growing plants. One of the early SpaceX ideas documented in Liftoff was to send an unmanned rocket to Mars and combine some Earth soil and seeds with Martian soil, and broadcast the resulting “Martian Oasis” via webcam. Unfortunately, we now know Martian soil is almost certainly riddled with perchlorates—long story short, the ground is salted, you might say, so Musk’s colonists can’t grow anything in it even if Earth soil is mixed in. Perchlorates are so poisonous to plants that when they occur in soil on Earth, fixing the problem involves not simply treating the contaminated dirt, but excavating it. In short, farming on Mars probably requires shipping dirt from Earth, presumably by delivering it bit-by-bit over time by a long procession of SpaceX brand rockets, and sequestering that soil somewhere on Mars where toxic Martian soil can’t get in, and if there’s one thing Mars has a lot of, it’s Martian soil.
And I haven’t even mentioned Mars’s thin atmosphere, or its 0.1 percent concentration of oxygen compared to the pleasant 21 percent here on Earth, nor have I mentioned the constant exposure to radiation caused by Mars’s lack of a magnetic field. Mars is, from the standpoint of pure biological instinct, the last place anything alive wants to be.
I don’t doubt that Musk can land life-support pods there, and maybe even burrow under the surface, and in my lifetime, maybe build a hardscrabble outpost with a greenhouse in it. But—and I’m far from the first person to point this out—this is all transparently perverse in the context of climate change. If there’s a sliding scale of planetary habitability running from 0-10, Mars is somewhere around 0.001, and Earth is about a 9.95. Earth could become a hellish 5/10, a blisteringly hot and stormy place with floods everywhere, plagued with political instability, and humanitarian emergencies galore, and still be a much better place to live than Mars. No, we won’t succeed in “fixing” climate change if that means getting our 9.95 planet back to 10. It’s enough of a struggle getting it to not go from 9.95 down to, say, 8 by the end of this century. But getting Mars to become a 3/10 will be infinitely harder than the extremely hard job we already have ahead of us.
So Mars isn’t a metaphorical lifeboat. Mars in this metaphor is more like a clump of plastic bags and soda bottles, and for now we’re better off staying on our ship, by which I mean Earth, even though it’s taking on water. Scenarios in which not even rudimentary plant life grows on Earth because of climate change, or there are almost no life-sustaining temperatures anywhere on the planet, or the Earth air is simply unbreathable—Mars-like scenarios, basically—aren’t actually on the table. This point is usually just trolling when Ben Shapiro makes it, but it’s basically true: humans aren’t going to go extinct because of the changing climate on Earth (Sorry to link to a Vox explainer, but here’s a Vox explainer about this). This doesn’t mean climate change isn’t the biggest emergency in the history of humanity. It just means we have to do something about the habitability of our planet, not flee to an even less habitable planet.
Many commentators and critics have latched onto the Planet B plan as one of Musk’s main motivations. According to Berger’s book, Liftoff, “Tesla was needed to save Earth from climate change, helping to break humans from their fossil fuel addiction. And SpaceX would offer a backup plan by making humanity a multiplanetary species.” But Elon Musk has now come out and said he doesn’t actually believe a climate apocalypse is imminent. In a conversation about his carbon capture X Prize, Musk recently told entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, “I don’t think we’re currently doomed.” He noted that while some people believe in climate doom, and others think climate change is no problem, he considers himself “somewhere in the middle.”
In other words, when Musk told Kara Swisher that humanity needed to get away from Earth and that one reason was mankind’s “crazy climate experiment,” he was bullshitting.
So when Elon Musk’s companies flout FAA regulations, or decide to deliberately annihilate a wetland ecosystem, set out to drill for fossil fuels, or force a community to disintegrate, or choke Earth orbit with unprecedented levels of space debris; when Elon Musk makes himself one of the richest people in history on the backs of exploited workers forced to stay on the job while injured, and fires people for staying home during a pandemic, a policy that most likely caused 440 workers to get infected; and then plays the Mars Card to justify it, my question is what for?
If extinction-level threats to Earth are likely millennia away, and present-day threats to Earth won’t be in any way helped by the existence of a Martian colony comprising a few airtight space yurts and a rocket landing pad, why exactly am I supposed to thank you for that, Elon Musk?
The answer is the average person doesn’t owe Elon Musk any thanks at all. Granted, other billionaires do much worse things with their money than building space ships, but that’s not saying much. When Musk plays the Mars Card, he might as well be saying “Excuse me Bernie Sanders, but your criticism fails to take into account the fact that I am trying to perfect my golf swing.” It may not be evil per se, but it’s about as morally neutral as billionaires get.
So a better question might be, why is Elon Musk so preoccupied with this?
When he’s not playing the Mars Card, his other explanation for his actions is very revealing. It’s not actually meant to be a solution to any sort of problem. He’s said himself that “life can’t just be about solving problems.” The aspect of space exploration that he claims to find the most “motivating” is that it “creates a sense of adventure and it makes people excited about the future.”
Compared to any claim about saving lives or solving climate change, this comes across as sincere to me. The Musk biography by Ashlee Vance paints a picture of an Elon Musk who—like most Americans, myself included—is easily distracted by detours into fantasy, even when he’s talking about something serious. A paper on the importance of solar power that he wrote when he was attending U Penn, “depicted a pair of giant solar arrays in space.” In his early days as an intern on the ultracapacitor project at Pinnacle Research Institute, a time when he was working on a potential fuel source that has implications for the green energy transition, Vance notes that Musk couldn’t really stay on task. “Musk could talk at length about how ultracapacitors might be used to build laser-based sidearms in the tradition of Star Wars and just about any other futuristic film,” Vance writes.
And I’m not saying that just because he enjoys swashbuckling science fiction fantasies, Elon Musk is completely out of touch with reality. “I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” he told Ars Technica last year. Musk has also said he wants to live “100 good [years].” I find these quotes remarkable, not just because Musk acknowledges the slow timelines involved in colonizing Mars, but because he acknowledges his own mortality (when he isn’t jabbering about uploading the contents of people’s brains to computers, which I get the sense is more of a sales pitch for his company Neuralink than a personal fantasy). A large subset of tech billionaires, including Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and most of all Elon Musk’s former colleague at PayPal, Peter Thiel, are trying to live forever. I admire Musk’s relative frankness about death, much as I admire his occasional honesty about how much he likes having a good time.
It seems pretty obvious that having a good time while he’s alive is the core of Elon Musk’s Mars mission. After all, his interest in life’s Big Questions doesn’t go very deep. He seems to have no understanding at all of the philosophy that might inform, to name one example, his deeply uninformed rants about the human mind, and he readily admitted his shallow understanding of philosophy in a 2018 series of tweets. “Should prob articulate philosophy underlying my actions. It’s pretty simple & mostly influenced by Douglas Adams & Isaac Asimov,” he said (later in that thread, he would play the Mars Card vis-a-vis Tesla worker pay).
Full disclosure: I love Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov just as much as Elon Musk (except for Asimov’s sex pest tendencies). The wonderful Foundation books by Asimov and the wonderful The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Adams both have a certain mind-expanding matter-of-factness about multimillennial timelines, in which humanoid civilization expands across the galaxy into other worlds, and there’s an awful lot of Musk emotional DNA to be found in these books. Adams’ world-creator character Slartibartfast is a sort of quirky nerd artiste who helped design Earth, and secretly signs his name in a coastline. Asimov’s Hari Seldon is a kind of benevolent genius who, while misunderstood in his own time, sets humanity on course to survive into the distant future, and his legacy is as a sort of scientific prophet. I often doubt that Elon Musk has read as deeply as he often claims, but his actions suggest he really internalized Adams and Asimov.
Musk claims to have, “read all the philosophers that I could get my hands on. And then ultimately I read Douglas Adams and I think he had the best approach.” It’s a mystery just how many books Musk read before he settled on humorist Douglas Adams as the person with all the answers. He might have been able to get his hands on a whole shelf of philosophy books, or just a handful. I know of three specific philosophers he claims to have read: Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Karl Marx. In any case I take him at his word that no “philosophers” other than Adams and Asimov appealed to him, because it’s reflected in his actions. He would probably treat his workers differently if he had found, say, John Rawls persuasive. If he’d taken an interest in someone like Jeremy Bentham for instance, he might not be building rockets at a time when climate change is an emergency that threatens perhaps billions of lives.
As a powerful entity who doesn’t treat workers well, and plans to colonize Mars, Elon Musk is far from alone. The United Arab Emirates landed an unmanned probe on Mars in February, and they seem to have elaborate plans for their eventual colony. China has Martian plans of its own. Jeff Bezos isn’t really into the whole Mars thing, but his overall plan for space exploration strikes most of the same notes as Elon Musk’s.
If Elon Musk were a lone voice speaking up in favor of colonizing space while the rest of the world ignored the issue, the Mars Card would almost make sense, but that’s far from the actual reality. SpaceX actually earned some serious bragging rights earlier this month by scoring the contract to build the lander that NASA will use to put a man and woman on the moon in about three years, decades before the likely groundbreaking ceremony on Musk City. But “multi-sphere species” doesn’t have the same ring as “multiplanetary species” I guess.
Sometimes when he plays the Mars Card, Elon Musk acknowledges that the space colonization is kind of crowded. When he claimed in Guadalajara to want to “make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi-planetary,” that was Elon Musk being unusually honest, in a way. Musk knows he won’t live forever. He knows in the long run, the thing from the books he liked when he was 14—humans whizzing around in spaceships—will come to pass whether he contributes to the project or not. Whatever the consequences may be for humanity in the near term, Musk just wants to die knowing there will eventually be plaques and statues on Mars (or, more likely, cryptocurrency coins) with his face on them. Oh, and he also wants to have a lot of fun in the meantime.
I wish he would just come out and say that.