No, billionaires don’t want to go to Mars to escape Earth – 02/04/2023 – Sidereal Messenger

The idea of ​​associating space exploration with some kind of escapism has long been commonplace, but it has been gaining traction as billionaires push to promote the occupation of space and, in particular, the colonization of Mars. With some reason even. It is very difficult to associate tycoons with attitudes that are not petty and opportunistic, and a superficial analysis can give the impression that these rich people are really merely planning their ultra-expensive escape plan, after ruthlessly promoting the devastation of the Earth.

I found the same reasoning in works as diverse and recent as “The day we returned from Mars”, a great book by mathematician and historian of science Tatiana Roque, and “Life is not useful”, a provocative booklet by thinker Aílton Krenak. And even a bolder version of the plot, involving a trip to an exoplanet, ended up in the instant classic “Don’t Look Up”, Adam McKay’s film with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Hence the need to call people to reason and say, loud and clear: no, billionaires do not want to go to Mars to escape Earth. Even the worst and most devastated version of our planet (and we are working hard to get there) is a better and safer environment for human life than the most benign facilities we can have on Mars. And the billionaires most interested in space, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, know this. Not because they don’t have their blind spots and flaws, but because they’ve been nerds since before they were billionaires.

Musk, a proponent of Mars colonization, sees this effort not as an escape (he personally doesn’t even want to go) but as an aesthetic decision: in essence, he argues that the future will be more interesting if humanity becomes multiplanetary. Bezos, when defending the occupation of space, says he is thinking about the preservation… of the Earth. His idea is that, with space infrastructure installed, it will be possible to take heavy industries off the planet, leaving it as an ecological sanctuary, where humans will be able to live in balance with nature without giving up the life provided by technology.

These are grandiose visions – perhaps unfeasible, certainly multigenerational – but not escapist.

I can imagine, thousands of years ago, the same criticisms were leveled against the Krenak ancestors who decided to make the perilous crossing of the Behring Strait to occupy America. Could they have been escapists? Did they leave any scorched earth behind in Asia? Or did they merely follow the human instinct to always look for the next horizon? And what wonderful cultures did not flourish on our continent because of this bold, perhaps reckless, decision? With a vast open future (less than 70 years ago we launched the first satellite into space), the Solar System could very well end up being our real home. And the Earth, as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said, just the cradle.

This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.

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