Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,36

Of the sheer improbability of these two men—one for whom New Zealand was a means of shoring up his wealth and power in a coming civilizational collapse, one for whom it was home, a source of hope for a more equal and democratic society—just happening to cross paths at an art exhibition loosely structured around the binary opposition of their political views no mention was made, and they went their separate ways.

Thiel left his contact details with the gallery, suggesting that Simon get in touch. He did, and Thiel responded quickly: he’d been intrigued by what he had seen but claimed to be a little disturbed by how dark his cyber-libertarianism appeared when refracted through the lens of The Founder’s Paradox. In any case, the conversation continued, and they made arrangements to meet on Simon’s next trip to the United States.

Simon was eager to keep talking, if only because he was determined to reach a deeper understanding of Thiel’s vision of the future. Anthony, the more straightforwardly political in his antagonism toward Thiel and what he represented, was bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, though strangely thrilled by it, too. For my part, this came as a disorienting rug-pull ending—partly because the monster had materialized, and he was therefore no longer merely a human emblem of the moral vortex at the center of the market, but also an actual human, goofily got up in polo shirt and shorts, sweating in the heat, traipsing along to an art gallery to indulge his human curiosity about what the art world thought of his notoriously weird and extreme politics. A sovereign individual in the same physical environment as us ordinary subject citizens. But it also deepened the mystery of what Thiel had planned for New Zealand, for the future.

There was one mystery that did get solved, though not by me: the admittedly frivolous enigma of what sort of renovations those builders were working on at the apocalyptic pied-à-terre in Queenstown. Nippert, in a recent New Zealand Herald article, had published the architect’s plans for the place. Thiel was making some alterations to the master bedroom. He was putting in a panic room.

5

OFF-WORLD COLONY

Toward the end of the final episode of the National Geographic documentary series Mars, there is a scene where Elon Musk, the founder of the private space transportation company SpaceX, visits Cape Canaveral with his young son. Together they ascend the elevator up the launch tower to where the space shuttles once began their trajectory into space, and he explains to the boy that in years past this was exactly how the astronauts themselves would have ascended before launching. As Musk and his son look out over the Kennedy Space Center, the green swampland, the Atlantic Ocean beyond, the billionaire speaks in voice-over of his company’s mission to colonize Mars, and of how it had always seemed to him that we should have gone there by now, that we somehow lost our way. “And now,” he says, “we’re going to get back there.”

The series ends with a scene of the first successful launch of SpaceX’s reusable rocket, a crucial aspect of the company’s plan for establishing a colony on Mars. There is the sublime vision of the rocket, spreading its dorsal fins, positioning itself upright over the landing pad, coming to a miraculous rest amid a great torrent of flames. And we see in tight close-up the youthful faces of SpaceX’s employees, refulgent in the hopeful glow of the rocket’s fire, and an explosion of ecstasy and relief, as though, six years after NASA retired the space shuttle program and almost fifty after the last man walked on the moon, the world itself had been redeemed, the future restored to its rightful grandeur.

“It’s kind of amazing,” says Musk, “that this window of opportunity is open for life to go beyond Earth. And we just don’t know how long the window is going to be open. The thing that gets me most fired up is that creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would be the greatest adventure ever in human history. It would be so exciting to wake up in the morning and think that that’s what’s happening.”

I will acknowledge that I held Musk in more or less unwavering contempt, because as a union-busting billionaire who had hijacked the language of collective hope and aspiration to promote a private enterprise for sending wealthy people to Mars, he seemed to me to reflect what was most degraded and abject