Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,39

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