Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,38

were numerous talks on the kinds of difficulties colonists might face on Mars, from natural disasters to teenage delinquency to the lack of a clearly defined legal regime for recognizing property rights in space under current US and international law. There was a talk by a Lutheran bishop entitled “Is Mars Exploration Virtuous?” (Given that the Lutheran bishop was also a founding member of the Mars Society, I felt confident in predicting that the answer would be yes.)

All these questions were in themselves interesting, but what I really wanted to know was where this fixation on colonizing Mars arose from, what it revealed about our relationship with the future of our own planet. I had long been of the opinion that there was no more lurid symptom of our current cultural malaise than the notion that we needed a “backup planet” for humanity. Although its advocates spoke of it as a manifestation of an indomitable spirit of exploration and adventure, it seemed to me to represent something like the opposite: an absolute surrender to an exhaustion in the bones of civilization. Since my trip to New Zealand—since my encounter with the site of Peter Thiel’s planned apocalypse retreat, and with the logic of escape and conquest represented in Simon Denny’s Founders board game piece—my fascination with the idea of Mars colonization had grown, and merged with my larger anxieties about an inhuman future.

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