Yesterday I wrote about Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest toddler, who would rather send his vast personal fortune up to space than use it to solve any problems down here. Or, as Bezos himself said in a recent interview, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.” My argument was, essentially, Jeff Bezos is a human Scrooge McDuck and should give up some of that cash for the public good, both in the form of taxes and philanthropic donations.
Then, this morning, I woke up to a tweet that I’m not going to post here to protect the guilty but it said, roughly, “But Herzog, we neeeeed space travel!!1 This planet is going to shit and if we don’t get off this rock we’re going to diiiiiiiie!!!. And what if there’s an asteroid??? MUST HAVE PLAN B, DAMMIT.”
My response: No, we don’t.
Humans are animals—animals with disproportionately large brains who lost most of our fur as we evolved from our simian brethren and/or Naired it all off in high school, but we are animals nonetheless. We have no more right to this planet or any other than the cockroaches hiding in our walls. Contrary to what you learned in Bible school, planet Earth was not made for human beings and if we use up all the resources on this one, we don’t deserve a Planet B—which we would undoubtedly fuck up as well.
Bezos (and the aforementioned tweeter) are hardly alone in their big dreams of living off Earth. Fellow rich dude Elon Musk is guilty as well. Musk has said he wants to establish a colony on Mars with a population of one million humans. Personally, I doubt I’ll make the cut—Musk estimates it’ll cost between $100,000 to $200,000 per person, and I don’t think my trailer is worth that much—but, really, that’s fine by me. I’m a big fan of oxygen, something that planet’s atmosphere entirely lacks, along with water, soil, and cable television. And that’s what mystifies me so much about this desire to colonize Mars: Mars sucks! You’ve seen The Martian, right? There’s so little nitogen in the soil (which is more rocks and dust than dirt) that Matt Damon had to fertilize potatoes, basically the only thing that can grow on Mars, with his own shit. That’s exactly what the lucky million Martians will find themselves doing if Musk gets his way, along with never going outside without your space suit on because you will literally die. Earth, on the other hand, is the perfect planet for us and the millions of species that will eventually perish because we like to run our air conditioners when it’s 70 degrees outside. We don’t deserve Earth, but we’re lucky to be here, so how about all the millionaires and billionaires and government bodies get it together and work on the big, beautiful, oxygenated orb we’ve already got?
Personally, I doubt all this talk of space travel and going to Mars is really about developing an escape hatch for humankind at all. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may be myopic, but they are not dumb. I am sure that both of them realize that it makes way more sense to invest their fortunes in renewable energy and other humanity-saving technologies than in colonies on Mars (and, to his credit, Musk is at least working on some low-carbon tech). In reality, I think the desire to go space is all about being first. These guys probably think of themselves as explorers, and because every spare patch of land on this planet has already been counted and claimed, they’ve turned their eyes up. It’s too late to be a Magellan down here, but it’s not too late to be the first asshole on Mars.
Of course, it’s not just rich guys who want to explore the Red Planet: On Saturday, NASA is launching a new mission to Mars, which they hope will unveal some mysteries about the planet’s interior. The cost for this mission? Over $800 million. Meanwhile in Puerto Rico, 90,000 people still don’t have power and the government just announced austerity measures that will close schools, increase college tuition, and cut pensions and other benefits. But sure, let’s send a lander to Mars.
The good news is, in the end, planet Earth will be fine. Ice caps may melt and sea levels may rise and rivers may flood and droughts may spread and there will be—there already is—much suffering down here for humans on Earth. But, eventually, humankind will die off, just as everything does. And then, after thousands of years, our buildings will crumble and our concrete will break and our nuclear waste will degrade, and the only traces of humans—the brilliant, cancerous species that once roamed the Earth on two legs—will be stuck in the fossil record for good. And I, at least, find this hopeful: We, as a species, have done miraculous things, but, in the end, we’re just animals, no better or worse than T. Rex. Earth will survive long after we’ve made it uninhabitable for ourselves. We don’t need to go suffer on Mars to see that.
