There was a long interlude of enthusiastic applause, during which I considered anew how intimately this rhetoric—Zubrin’s talk of asteroid settlements, Musk’s talk of the spirit of exploration—was entangled with the rhetoric on which America itself was founded: the apocalyptic invocation of the passing of an old world, the birth of a new. To speak of nonconforming people building new societies, of the entrepreneurial spirit of nation-building, was to explicitly appeal to an American mythology of pilgrims, founders, pioneers. Zubrin’s Mars struck me as a futurist vision of the “city on a hill” invoked by the Puritan preacher John Winthrop in his famous speech to the passengers of the Arabella as they set out for the New World. Mars was America, I thought. The future was the past.
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In his book How We’ll Live on Mars, Stephen L. Petranek writes that “Mars will become the new frontier, the new hope, and the new destiny for millions of earthlings who will do almost anything to seize the opportunities waiting on the Red Planet.” Like the first European colonists in America, the first humans on Mars, he says, will need to be extremely resilient and determined. This new New World, like its predecessor, will be profoundly hostile to settlement. They will need to find ways to make the air breathable, and to extract sufficient ice from the regolith, the Martian surface soil, to provide water. They will need to construct shelters, perhaps from regolith bricks, to protect them from the extreme cold and from the sun’s radiation, which passes unfiltered through the planet’s thin atmosphere. The example set by these pioneers, he writes, “will create a wave of fortune seekers to rival those of the California gold rush.”
And just as the first European settlers in America saw themselves as ensuring the survival of Christendom, these first settlers on Mars will represent an insurance policy for civilization, for humanity itself. “There are real threats to the continuation of the human race on Earth,” writes Petranek, “including our failure to save the home planet from ecological destruction and the possibility of nuclear war. Collision with a single asteroid could eliminate most life, and eventually our own sun will enlarge and destroy Earth. Long before that happens, we must become a spacefaring species, capable of living not only on another planet but ultimately in other solar systems. The first humans who emigrate to Mars are our best hope for the survival of our species.”
Mars, as Musk once put it, is the “backup” planet for humanity, “just in case something goes wrong with Earth.” But it represents something else, too, an idea much deeper and stranger and more difficult to sell. It is a means by which we—or certain of us, at any rate, with the will and financial means to do so—might leave behind our planet of origin, transcend the human world entirely. As with the imagined collapse scenarios of the doomsday preppers, Mars colonization is apocalyptic scenario as escapist fantasy. In her prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes about the response in the American press to the 1957 launch of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik, the first human object ever to leave the planet and enter outer space. Notwithstanding the Cold War complexities of the launch, she observes, the immediate reaction was one of joy. But it was less a triumphant than a relieved joy—a “relief about the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.’ ” (This statement, culled from a newspaper report on the event, was not merely the overenthusiastic framing of an American reporter, but in fact echoes the words etched on the tomb of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian aeronautical engineer and space flight pioneer: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.”)
The banality of the statement, Arendt insists,
should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?
Reading Arendt’s words, I hear in my mind the plaintive machine of Stephen Hawking’s voice, narrating the BBC documentary Expedition New Earth: “We are the first species that has the potential to escape Earth.” Like Musk and Zubrin, what Hawking is appealing to is a yearning for transcendence. There is, yes, an apocalypse that may happen—a man-made apocalypse like climate change; a cosmic apocalypse like the impact of an asteroid—but this is on some level a cover story for a deeper impulse, a desire to be done with the world itself.
And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit, of escape as a means toward the nobility of self-determination. The cultural critic Sarah Sharma has argued for an understanding of exit as an exercise of patriarchal power, “a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy.” It’s a force that she places in opposition to the more traditionally maternal value of “care.” The politics of exit are pursued, she insists, at the expense of a politics of care. “Care,” she writes, “is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition. Women’s exit is hardly ever on the table, given that women have historically been unable to choose when to leave or enter inequitable power relations, let alone enter and exit in a carefree manner.”
The world, after all, requires attention. The world requires care. To borrow Arendt’s terms, to repudiate the Earth—which is to say, the Mother—is to reject the imperative of care. Mars represents a conquering of new territory, and a leaving behind of the old: a self-determination for the few at the cost of collective autonomy. The days of this world are numbered. For those who are willing to escape it, a new life awaits.
The frontier rhetoric around Mars colonization—the invocation of pioneers, pilgrims, Manifest Destiny—brings to mind for me the advertising blimp that hovers over the filthy neon hellscape of downtown Los Angeles in one of Blade Runner’s early scenes. A gigantic screen displays the messages “Best Future” and “Breathe Easy,” while a voice blares from its speakers, addressing the acid rain–sodden subjects below: “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” The voice is a male one. It is confident and cheerful, and richly reassuring. It is the very voice of American capitalism itself.
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We return, for now, to Earth: specifically to a windowless ground-floor room in Old Pasadena, where a man named Art Harman—slacks, navy blazer, gold buttons—was standing behind a podium. Art Harman was the founder of an organization called the Coalition to Save Manned Space Exploration. He was a former adviser to the Trump presidential campaign; a conservative policy wonk specializing in both the expansion of American business interests into outer space and the protection of America’s borders on the surface of Earth.