Elon Musk Isn’t Religious Enough to Colonize Mars
Silicon Valley wants to explore space as tech entrepreneurs. We should be traveling as pilgrims.
BY JAMES POULOS
OCTOBER 10, 2016
At a technology conference this summer, Elon Musk suggested that if humanity is not yet living in a computer simulation, it is probably already doomed. The only alternative, he explained, was so-called base reality (what most of us would refer to simply as “reality”), where some calamitous event — whether climate change, nuclear war, or an asteroid — was eventually liable to snuff our existence on Earth once and for all. “Either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist,” he said. “Those are the two options.”
Of course, Musk has also mentioned a different alternative to extinction: the possibility of leaving this planet and decamping for another. As CEO of SpaceX, Musk is deeply involved, and financially invested, in developing plans for a human colony on Mars in about seven years. But, strangely, Musk hasn’t yet explained whether or not he sees interplanetary life as an alternative to living in a simulation, not just to dying on Earth.
It’s telling that Musk has also elided one crucial aspect of building a Mars colony: who precisely ought to be sent to build it. And that omission bears directly on his recent musings on technological advancement and the earthly apocalypse. Musk, and his Silicon Valley backers, are right that humanity’s destiny might be to extend life to other planets. But Musk’s seeming belief that we’re already stuck in a simulated world leaves only dubious reasons to endorse his understanding of what destiny means — and who ought to fulfill it.
The key is in distinguishing two versions of destiny. The first is relatively more detached from (what seems to be) base reality — that is, the natural world. According to this version of destiny, the purpose of space colonization is fully tied up with the purpose of scientific progress in general, complete with transformational changes to our bodies and minds that don’t just augment or twist our experience of being human but break with nature completely, turning us into post-humans. People dreaming this dream have good reason to prefer that our first Mars colonists would see themselves as being on the frontier of such technological progress and committed to pushing it forward — to making the post-human dream as much of a reality as possible, as quickly as possible.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/10/elon-musk-isnt-religious-enough-to-colonize-mars/
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