Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,37
about our time. This was a man, after all, who had earlier that year attempted to win hearts and minds by launching one of his own Tesla cars into space. It was hard to imagine anything more pathetic, anything more stupid or crass, than launching a red sports car into perpetual solar orbit, sullying the vast inhuman emptiness of the cosmos with the shimmering trash of consumerism. (At the time, I wondered why no one at SpaceX had thought to point out to Musk that he could have ensured his red sports car would orbit the sun indefinitely by leaving it parked in front of his house.) I had this much in common with Musk’s most fervent fans: I saw him as a mythical figure. But the myth I had in mind was one of my own imagining, in which a perfect simpleton had, out of some unknowable Olympian whim, been singled out by the gods and granted the threefold gifts of intelligence, ingenuity, and money, which gifts he employed in precisely the manner a simpleton would: to pursue a civilization on Mars, for instance, and to launch luxury consumer goods into outer space with a rocket.
And yet, as I watched these scenes on my laptop on a flight from Dublin to Los Angeles, I found myself strangely moved. Perhaps the low oxygen level in the cabin was affecting my cognitive functioning, but I felt that there was something poignant about this nostalgia for the future, this insistence that what seemed to have been irredeemably lost might in fact be regained. I could see why people were so deeply invested in Musk and his project, why they were so exercised and even moved by his presence. He seemed to me, in that moment, neither a divinely gifted moron nor a vicious robber baron, but rather a child, an innocent boy who wanted nothing but to go to Mars, and to inspire others to want to go with him.
The series ends with an inspirational speech from one Robert Zubrin, a former aerospace engineer at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin who in 1998 had founded an organization called the Mars Society, which advocated for the human settlement of Mars. Leaning toward the camera, eyes wide with a kind of anguished joy, Zubrin whispers urgently as though trying to awaken the viewer, the world, from a deep sleep: “Look up! Look up! There is everything out there! There’s trillions of other Earths! That’s why we’re going to do it. And the next time we go, we’re going to go to stay.” Watching this scene, I found myself overtaken by a kind of ecstatic melancholy. I watched it over and over, clicking rewind again and again, submitting to the strange feeling it provoked in me, a sadness that could not remotely have been intended, and which I myself barely understood. The phrase trillions of other Earths had an especially powerful effect on me, perhaps because it brought to mind St. John’s words toward the end of the Book of Revelation: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”
It was Zubrin and the Mars Society that had drawn me to Los Angeles in that late summer of 2018, at a time when the worst wildfires in California history seemed at last to be submitting to a weeks-long containment effort. I was attending the Mars Society’s twenty-first annual gathering at the Pasadena Convention Center. The organization had thousands of members, and chapters in twenty-eight countries, and it acted as both a public outreach organization and a political lobbying group for the cause of Mars settlement. It also maintained two research stations, one in the Utah desert and another in the Arctic, where teams of would-be pilgrims were dispatched for two weeks at a time “to simulate life on the Martian surface.”
Entitled “Mars and the Space Revolution,” the conference promised to explore how we might go about building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Around this central question, four full days of talks were scheduled across an array of topics. How quickly could a Mars colony become completely Earth-independent? What might a new Martian religion look like? How would a Martian colony be structured politically? How might the blockchain facilitate an interplanetary financial system? How could self-replicating robots be used to terraform a hostile alien environment? What were the logistics of drilling for water on Mars? There