We will never colonize Mars

Or anywhere else off planet for that matter. Jennifer Ouellette has an enlightening interview with Adam Becker, the author of a new book titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which sounds like my kind of book — he tears apart the claims of the tech billionaires. They’ve become increasingly detached from reality since the days when I first stumbled across Yudkowski and Kurzweil, who were patently bonkers then, and since then have only increased in both influence and insanity.

More Everything Forever covers the promise and potential pitfalls of AI, effective altruism, transhumanism, the space race to colonize Mars, human biodiversity, and the singularity, among many other topics—name-checking along the way such technological thought leaders as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, William MacAskill, Peter Singer, Marc Andreessen, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Jeff Bezos, and yes, Elon Musk. It all boils down to what Becker calls the “ideology of technological salvation,” and while its uber-rich adherents routinely cite science to justify their speculative claims, Becker notes that “actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims” are largely dismissed. For Becker, this ideology represents a profound threat, not the promise of a utopian future.

“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”

That list of “thought leaders” is damning in itself — they aren’t champions of thought and science and technology, they’re cheerleaders for fantasy and greed. Every one of them ought to be dismissed from any consideration of respectability. The lunatic fringe is running the show, and prospering greatly.

One of the points of the interview is that they’re all out of touch with reality. They’ve absorbed all these wild ideas from science fiction, but never consider the science part. For instance, they apparently don’t understand thermodynamics.

I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.

They are all fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth, so of course they reject the science, or fall for twisted, perverse wish-fulfillment versions of the science.

Part of this bad science is Elon Musk’s hype about colonizing Mars. It’s not going to happen.

…all of the interesting places in space are really far apart. Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.

From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars. We come from a long line, 4 billion years of optimization for life on a planet the size of Earth, with air and water freely available, under certain narrow ranges of temperature and pressure, and we simply lack the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible for life to find a way, but if we did artificially modify ourselves to produce descendants who could live on Mars, they wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d probably have to scrap sentience and all the other baggage we’ve accumulated, that we consider so important to the human experience, to generate an ecosystem of creatures that could survive in some way on a mostly airless and waterless frozen ball of rock. There isn’t any point in aspiring to such an artificial state.

Don’t even get me started on Ray Kurzweil. I first read one of his hopelessly delusional books over 20 years ago. Hated it. He was just making shit up about the technological progression he imagined was going to occur, all in service of his pathological fear of death. We’re also not ever going to be immortal.

Kurzweil tries to get around this by saying that you’re not going to be immortal, but you can live as long as you want to. Sure, that gets around some of it. But Kurzweil also thinks that we’re going to find a way around the second law of thermodynamics, which we’re not. I do think that fear of death is at the root of a lot of this, if not all of it. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that death is what gives life meaning. I would say that the human experience is defined by the limitations that death imposes, the fact that our time is limited. If you remove that constraint, that would fundamentally alter the human condition in ways that very well might not be pleasant.

Silicon Valley isn’t about technology, it’s about selfishness and greed, and weird little gnomes with stupid ideas who have made a niche for themselves by burrowing into junk science. We’re not going to become near-immortal short of turning ourselves into jellyfish. Well, maybe Henrietta Lacks is immortal, but at a price no one would want to pay.

Maybe that explains what’s going on: the worst and richest people in the world are working hard to become mindless, cancerous jellyfish.

None of these people have contributed anything to our understanding of the world, but are experts at accumulating personal wealth by leeching off everyone else.