Baldly stated, the idea was this: sooner or later, whether because of climate change or asteroid impact or some other unforeseen cosmic or terrestrial snarl-up, our planet would become utterly inhospitable to life. In order to avoid the complete annihilation of our species, therefore, we would by that point need to have established a human settlement elsewhere in the universe. Stephen Hawking, who in the final years of his life was one of the great secular prophets of apocalypse, put it as follows: “I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth and make a new home on another planet. To stay risks annihilation. It could be an asteroid hitting the earth. It could be a new virus, climate change, nuclear war, or artificial intelligence gone rogue. For humans to survive I believe we must have the preparations in place within one hundred years.”
* * *
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In his opening keynote on the first morning of the conference, Zubrin—mid-sixties, scholarly, yet with an air of squinting resilience—spoke of a space-flight revolution led by Musk, whom he portrayed as a redemptive figure in our darkened time. Even if he were to fail at this point, said Zubrin, he would still have succeeded, because he had proven beyond all reasonable doubt that it was possible for an entrepreneur, a private citizen, to do what only governments had previously been thought capable of. Creative forces had been unleashed, he said, and it was now clear how we could get to Mars.
It was Zubrin who had brought Musk into the Martian fold—before he started SpaceX, Musk had donated $100,000 to help fund the Utah station—and he was now a sort of John the Baptist with respect to the billionaire space entrepreneur. (Musk was one of a handful of tech billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who were investing large amounts of their fortunes in the prospect of privatized space travel, projects that were as often as not presented as a means of securing the future itself, as though the last hope for the species was the largesse of billionaires who possessed both the genius and heroism of spirit to save an imperiled humanity.)
Zubrin then proceeded directly to confrontation with the eschatological zeitgeist. He did not believe, he said, that we were living at the end of history, but rather at the beginning; and neither were we at the end of science, but at the beginning of that, too. We humans had certainly done okay so far, he said; we had gotten “the overture” done—getting out of the African savannah, peopling the farthest reaches of our home planet, building what he called a “Type One” civilization—but now it was time to begin the real work, the work of building a “Type Two” civilization. It was time that we became a space-faring species. And from there, he said, we would construct a much more potent humanity, a “Type Three” civilization that would spread into the outer realms of the galaxy, even the universe.
Just then my view of the podium was obscured by an elderly couple, latecomers, establishing themselves in the row ahead of me. The woman was especially ancient, proceeding with the aid of a walker, and wearing despite the heat of a Southern Californian morning a pair of powder blue woolen gloves, presumably as a measure against some or other painful skin condition. As her companion helped her into a seat and positioned her walker neatly in the aisle, I thought how strange it was for someone so old to be attending an event so resolutely oriented toward the future. Looking around the auditorium, I was struck by the general agedness of the assembled Mars enthusiasts. Perhaps it had to do with it being a Thursday morning, a time of the week more amenable to retirees (and writers of literary nonfiction) than to the typical gainfully employed Angeleno, but the average age seemed to me to hover somewhere around the mid-sixties. And it was impossible to overlook the overwhelming whiteness of the room: of the perhaps two hundred or so Earthlings who’d shown up for Zubrin’s keynote, only one as far as I could see was black, and he happened to be stationed behind the video camera set up at the rear of the room—here, I surmised, for professional reasons, rather than any deep personal enthusiasm for colonizing distant worlds.
I kept hearing this word, colonizing, and it seemed to me a strange and revealing choice of terminology, given the significant weight of historical baggage attached to the whole project of colonialism (conquest, slavery, mass murder, subjugation, and so on). But the prospect of building a human civilization on Mars had a deeper motivation than that of ensuring the survival of the species: it was a fantasy of retrieving the idea of the future from the past, recuperating a twentieth-century optimism and excitement about technology and science, and rehabilitating it for the present. It was, in this sense, an exercise in future-nostalgia.
I had recently read Ashlee Vance’s authorized biography of Musk, and this yearning for an age of colonial expansion ran through its pages like a hot shiver. Around the time of his first encounter with Zubrin and the Mars Society, Musk had logged onto NASA’s website and had been appalled to find no detailed plan or timeline for the exploration of Mars. He was of the opinion, Vance writes, “that the very idea of America was intertwined with humanity’s desire to explore. He found it sad that the American agency tasked with doing audacious things in space and exploring new frontiers as its mission seemed to have no serious interest in investigating Mars at all. The spirit of Manifest Destiny had been deflated or maybe even come to a depressing end, and hardly anyone seemed to care.”
At the 2012 Mars Society Convention—in the very room, in fact, where I was now sitting—Musk had received a “Mars Pioneer Award” from Zubrin and had given a speech in which he explicitly linked a future of Mars exploration to an American history of colonial expansion. “The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he said. “Almost everyone came here from somewhere else. You couldn’t ask for a group of people that are more interested in exploring the frontier.” (Musk did not allude in his speech to those who had been brought here against their will, or who had been here long before the frontier explorers he was invoking. What he meant by the “human spirit of exploration” was, in essence, the white European spirit of colonial conquest and exploitation.)
When Americans talked about settling Mars, it seemed to me that what they were really talking about was reinventing America itself, renovating the belief in their country’s greatness not as mere reality, but as fable: as a morally instructive narrative of ingenuity and righteousness. Musk himself was not, technically speaking, an American—he was from South Africa, itself a kind of inverted United States, in which the minority project of colonial white supremacism had eventually been overturned—but I would argue that those who are most profoundly and indivisibly American are in fact those immigrants who are energized by a romantic understanding of the country and its foundational mythos of liberty and possibility. Americans are made, not born.
Zubrin was approaching the stirring final moments of his keynote. He was speaking of how, after a new civilization was established on Mars, we could then proceed to building new settlements on asteroids. There would be thousands of new worlds, he said, in which nonconforming people, people with different ideas of how human society should be organized, and who were therefore not popular back on Earth, would have a chance to build societies around their ideas. Many would fail, he said, but some would surely succeed, and they would show the way for the rest of us. So if we did what we could do in our time, he said—disperse the fog, spread the vision, establish humanity on Mars—then five hundred years from now there would be human civilizations on thousands of worlds in our solar system and others, and they would be as grand compared with what we are today as we are to our distant ancestors on the African savannah. Because we were not native to this Earth, he said. We were native to Kenya, which was why we had these thin arms with no fur. We could not have settled in North America or Asia if we had not developed technology. But we had, he said, because we were creative, and we were resilient, and that was why we were going to inherit the stars.