🔒 Confronting the Popular Delusion of Colonizing Space

At the beginning of February, Elon Musk did another internal merger of his companies, putting to rest the notion that these are different companies in any meaningful sense. Earlier, he merged X with his AI company, XAI, and now he has merged X/XAI with his rocketry company, SpaceX. Then he and his son, X, drove their Model X to SpaceX/X/XAI to make X amount of bullshit claims while avoiding a global scandal about XAI’s X chatbot generating XXX images of children on demand.

 But this particular announcement was accompanied with a press release that this new super company will be “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth,” and it will launch one million data centers into space, vastly accelerating AI development, and establishing a “Kardashev II-level civilization” that will lead ultimately to humanity colonizing other planets and, eventually, the universe.

 I don’t know how much of that paragraph you understood but it doesn’t really matter because it’s 100% bullshit anyway. You could replace all of the nouns with the names of barnyard animals and it would make the same amount of sense. But it’s all in service of Musk’s oft-cited goal of “making human civilization interplanetary” because the sun is going to explode someday.

His valuation soared. He’s now worth like a trillion dollars purely because people believe this stuff.  The number one reason that even regular non-far-right-loonies tolerate this guy despite the comical racism and unbearable cringe is that people, in general, are desperate to get off this planet. They sincerely believe that he is the guy who’s going to do it.

 So let’s talk about “making human civilization interplanetary.” That people dream about this isn’t usually something that bothers me because it gives people a sense of wonder, and even Carl Sagan, beloved by so many including me, once said wistfully “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” It’s a message of peace and unity and positivity and hope. Even people who rightfully hate Elon Musk think this is one of his few positive aspirations and that he’s worth keeping around for that.

 But he’s ruined it. He’s an idiot who is ruining science because he’s convinced the most powerful people in the world that he’s the smartest man alive. He is probably the smartest man in the Trump administration in the same way that a flounder is the smartest thing in a bucket of seaweed. Musk successfully pressured Donald Trump to install his friend, tech CEO Jared “Satellite Dish Ears” Isaacman, as chief of NASA, and he promptly cancelled its space station program to instead build a base on the moon because Elon thinks that’s cool. It is regrettably time to dispel any illusion that Musk is doing a good and virtuous thing for humanity instead of a bunch of stupid idiot shit that won’t work and sucks and is also bad and ruinous.

We have to rip off the band-aid: Carl Sagan was wrong. We are never leaving Earth. I’m not talking about you and me, or the people alive today, I’m talking about our species. Or any species. We are never, ever, leaving Earth. Not ever.

 It’s not a case of pessimism, it’s a case of rock-hard physical reality. We might put a base on the moon, like Antarctica (but it’ll be super difficult), but also like Antarctica we will never colonize it. It’s possible that we will actually land on Mars someday. But nobody will ever, ever, live there. The sun will explode first.

 Let’s unpack the utterly unhinged delusions driving this man’s wealth and power:

We will never be a “Kardashev” civilization

Musk talks about the path to Mars and interstellar colonies involving us establishing a “Kardashev II-level civilization.” I don’t know how well-known this is outside of deep nerd circles, but he’s talking about the “Kardashev scale” which was proposed by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev and ranks hypothetical alien civilizations by the amount of energy they use. A type-I civilization uses all of the energy available on their home planet, and a type-2 civilization uses all of the energy of their star. That would require some kind of megastructure like a “Dyson sphere,” with apology for introducing even more jargon. That’s a giant hypothetical enclosed sphere of solar panels we could build around the sun to capture the entirety of its energy output.

 Some of you are tapping out already, and you’re right—that sounds like fantasy Star Trek nonsense. In fact, there was an episode of Star Trek about it. But this is what the inventor of the brutalist truck, ten types of exploding rocket, and a robot that calls itself “MechaHitler” thinks we’ll be able to achieve someday.

There’s a lot to unpack, here, starting with the fact that astrophysicist Freeman Dyson, who came up with the idea, wasn’t being serious. That’s a big one to start with, but it hasn’t deterred some astronomers from looking for them. There’s also the fact that there is zero incentive for a civilization to harness the entire energy output of a star. You cannot fathom how much energy that is. Picture every power plant on Earth being hooked up to a single cable you plug in to charge your iPhone. There is no conceivable use for that energy. One percent of it would simply melt the Earth.

 Furthermore! If we wanted to make a Dyson sphere, what would we build it out of? The inability of the average person to grasp universal scales is going to be a recurring theme here. 99.86% of the material in the solar system is the fucking sun.

I’m pretty sure what Elon Musk thinks he’s building, when he talks about a “Kardashev II civilization” in respect to launching a million satellites is a similar concept called a Dyson swarm. Sure, there’s probably enough matter in the solar system to make enough satellites to capture—not all, but a decent amount—of the sun’s output.

 Notice two things: First, we aren’t even a Kardashev I civilization yet, because we haven’t harnessed anywhere near the total energy of our own planet. Second, Musk isn’t talking about dismantling the solar system to power humanity, he’s talking about launching one million AI data centers into Earth’s orbit to run, fucking, Grok. You know, the “anti-woke” chatbot that he thinks is going to become sentient and discover new technologies sometime this year, once it stops generating child sexual abuse material for profit.

 This isn’t a Kardashev civilization. He’s just latching on to random and mostly debunked sci-fi stuff that his ruined brain has decided is a civilizational roadmap instead of some silly things that physicists, often in jest, have thrown against the wall. We’ll never be a Kardashev civilization because they don’t make sense, for a million reasons you can read about (here, for example.) And yet every other component of Musk’s grand plan for humanity makes somehow even less sense.

We will never colonize Mars

This is probably the one that’s going to surprise people the most because we’ve been told all our lives in both fiction and general discourse that this is not only achievable, but soon. Mars, after all, is the most similar planet to Earth (Venus is more similar in some ways but you would burst into flames before reaching the ground. There’s a reason we don’t send Venus rovers). Discovering water on Mars basically clinched it. That’s the only thing we need, right?

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