We're Not Going to Colonize Mars

On Adam Becker's new book and the people who are going to destroy the universe in the name of saving "humanity."

We’re not going to colonize Mars.

We’re not going to colonize Mars in my lifetime. We’re not going to colonize Mars in the lifetime of a baby born this afternoon. We’re not going to colonize Mars in the lifetime of a baby born 100 years from now.

We’re never going to colonize Mars.

We’re never going to colonize Mars because in order to colonize Mars we would need enough people on Mars for it to have a sufficiently developed high tech society to be self-sufficient should deliveries of persons and material from Earth ever stop.

Care to hazard a guess on how many people on Mars experts estimate that would require? Think on it a second before scrolling.

A billion. We need a billion people on Mars for it to be self-sustaining.

We’re not going to colonize Mars because if you walked on Mars without a space suit the saliva in your mouth would boil. We’re not going to colonize Mars because to allow for proper gestation of babies, pregnant women would need to live inside a centrifuge in order to mimic Earth’s gravitational pull. (Mars has 1/3 that of Earth.) After the babies are born, they may have to live inside centrifuges as well in order to allow for normal growth. (We are extraordinarily adapted to life on Earth.) A Mars colony would have to be largely underground because consistent exposure to the radiation on the surface would kill you.

The soil of Mars is poison. So is the air. The promise of terraforming Mars rests on dropping some nukes on the planet’s poles and then a bunch of handwaving.

I am drawing all of this from Adam Becker’s entertaining, thorough, vital, scary new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, And Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

This book has been haunting me since I finished it a couple of weeks ago. In a different moment, it would be a fun read about some fringe subcultures who have nutty ideas about science, society, and the future, ideas like literally dismantling the planet Mercury in order to create a “Dyson Swarm” that would be used to harvest all of the Sun’s energy in order to power space probes at the speed of light to allow for the total colonization of space, rinsing and repeating this process with other stars so as to keep harvesting the energy necessary for additional exploration.

But in this moment, the people who believe these nutty things are the richest and most powerful people in the world who have their hands directly on the levers of the United States Government. I’m talking about Elon Musk, who is pursuing Mars colonization even as he has destroyed government capacity through his DOGE project, arguably resulting in 300,000 deaths so far.

I’m talking about Jeff Bezos who, since he was a teenager, has believed in a future of humans living in space on massive “O’Neil cylinders,” space colonies that simulate Earth’s gravity, theorized out of science fiction, that Becker painstakingly demonstrates would be impossible to produce with our available scientific resources and materiel.

I’m talking about Peter Thiel who has what appears to have a wholly owned subsidiary in the from of current VPOTUS and quite possible future POTUS J.D. Vance.

I lost track of the number of times I muttered to myself, this is crazy - as Becker introduced me to a fresh character or wild belief. To Becker’s great credit, he resists this impulse at every turn. Becker takes every single argument seriously on its face and then probes it for truth against what we know about science, and what we believe about the parameters of a just world and human thriving.

When he meets with Anders Sandberg, one of the main figures of the Center for Effective Altruism, he notices that Sandberg has a medallion around his neck. Becker remarks on it and Sandberg says it’s for “cryonics” and he plans to have himself frozen when he dies. Becker gives Sandberg ample page time to lay out his beliefs and his theory before going to the world’s leading experts on the subject who point out that freezing human flesh effectively destroys it. Aware of these issues, Sandberg says he’s has faith in future human “plastination,” replacing human structures with plastic through the deployment of nanobots which could take care of those little details.

This is where I mutter, this is crazy, but Becker goes ahead and patiently discusses how nanobots, while perhaps theoretically possible, are so far afield from the current state of scientific knowledge and technology that they are purely fantastical.

As it happens, Mrs. Biblioracle was just re-watching an Avengers movie in which Hawkeye (How worthless is that guy?) gets a flesh wound patched up through this process. Sandberg is positing that cartoon fantasy will be real on a time scale that will allow him to be resurrected.

In truth, Sandberg is going to turn himself into a frozen pink slurry and pay some scam company for the privilege.

Becker is uniquely suited for this work because he is not only a journalist, but also holds a PhD in physics with a specialization in cosmology. He deeply understands the technical claims underneath the science fiction woo-woo, and takes care to unpack and then demolish them. The Effective Altruist math underpinning their “longtermism” philosophy, which argues that we should be taking a many actions as possible to develop technology that will protect the nearly uncountable number of human intelligences in the future - when we are spread across the universe - is shown by Becker to be particularly fragile, self-justifying bullshit.

At the same time, Becker pierces the ethical facade of this extreme form of utilitarianism that suggests sacrificing the fates of those living today for these future humans is a moral abomination.

The book covers all manner of groups and philosophies, not just the Effective Altruists, but the yang to their yin in the Effective Accelerationists. Both groups believe that our highest calling is to develop artificial intelligence that will save humanity. The only difference is that the altruists are worried AI might kill us first, so we have to work on the problem of AI “alignment.” The accelerationists have more of a YOLO attitude, admitting that the worst could happen, but even that would be kind of awesome, I guess.

Becker’s unspooling of the different schools of thinking, their histories and origins makes for a fascinating tour through history and technology. We meet the extropians who believe that humans are just a temporary stop on the road of evolution. They are eager for the “singularity” which will be a joining of human and machine, an end of death as our consciousnesses can be eternally preserved in some kind of technological matrix that travels through the universe powered by…you guessed it…nanobot technology.

At their most extreme, the extropians advocate for an affirmative human extinction provided it allows for the advancement of technology. You, me, us…we’re an obstacle to progress.

It’s all nuts.

But think of the callous indifference of Elon Musk to the millions of people he has immiserated, the hundreds of thousands he’s quite possibly had a direct hand in killing and tell me it doesn’t matter.

Becker comes at his subject as a one-time believer in the power of technology and the romance and potential of space travel. As a kid he ran out of dinosaur books and latched onto books about space, going all the way for that PhD. Because of these origins, even in his critical judgement of the science and philosophies of these different figures, he is nonetheless sympathetic, and in that sympathy he reveals something simple and profound underneath all this belief in an unbounded technological future.

These people are all terrified of dying. So terrified, they think they can forestall it, perhaps forever. But what does that life look like?

Consider one of the Becker’s main characters, Ray Kurzweil, one of the central figures of the transhumanist movement which believes in a future intelligence of combined humans and machines. Becker introduces Kurzweil saying, “Ray Kurzweil is pretty sure his dad isn’t going to stay dead.”

Kurzweil, who is 77-years-old himself, has “50 boxes” of his father’s stuff and believes that this along with some DNA extracted from the remaining bones and teeth at his father’s gravesite and some “recollections and memories” collected from his brain and others by…you guessed it…nanobots, will be recombined inside an AI program that will be “so realistic it will be like talking to my father.” Kurzweil’s father died at age 57, when Kurzweil was only 22 and just finishing his degree at MIT. Kurzweil, in this moment of emotional trauma decided that a human is a kind of “mind file” and the biggest problem is that the software of our mind file dies with the hardware of our physical body.

I sympathize with Kurzweil’s desire to have another conversation with his father. My dad died on the young side too, 64, when I was 35. I can’t claim to have very distinct memories of many conversations with my father when he was alive. Our most extended ones were on ski lifts, side-by-side, facing forward on the slow trip to the top. The last time I skied was 20 years ago when we sprinkled a portion of my father’s ashes on one of his favorite runs in Colorado. He would’ve gotten such a kick out of this newsletter. He would’ve been one of the first people to read it every week. I can imagine what he might say. This will have to be enough.

Kurzweil is not a dangerous figure himself, but this desire to defy death manifests as a drive for ultimate control, and it is not incidental that many of these major figures in the AI industry have no great fealty to democracy. Sam Altman has overtly stated it is his goal to create technology which will control the world’s economy because of its power. Peter Thiel is a supporter of an idea coined by Balaji Srinivasan, “The Network State” which would be a kind of government without geography organized around the interests of a tech oligopoly. Their favorite online weirdo/pretend historian Curtis Yarvin actively advocates for turning the U.S. into a monarchy. These people are seeking and seizing power across all different levels of government.

At the New Republic, Gil Duran (host of The Nerd Reich podcast) says Balaji’s (he goes by his first name) “appetite for autocracy is bottomless.”

It’s sad that these guys all fear death and democracy, but I’m with Daniel W. Drezner, these guys need to go the fuck to therapy.

I have no wish to die any time soon, but I honestly don’t fear death. I don’t know what this says about me, but I am comforted by my personal belief in a non-afterlife. Oblivion sounds like a nice, quiet, non-existence to me.

I am not afraid of death, but I am increasingly worried that these maniacs are going to kill us all.

One thing I am less scared of after reading More Everything Forever is a rogue AI turning us all into paperclips, a famous thought experiment from Nick Bostrom (one of the other central figures of the Effective Altruism movement) where a super intelligent AI tasked with making as many paperclips as possible winds up destroying all of humanity.

Becker patiently walks through the “reasoning” of those most worried about AI alignment and reveals that they are deploying the time-honored strategy of making a wild-assed guess. Becker also shares his own perspective about the limits of current AI and the kinds of breakthroughs (all theoretical) that would have to happen for something like super-intelligence to come to the fore.

But one thing I am more worried about is the acceleration of climate change driven by the insatiable desire for more energy combined with some bizarrely skewed notions of utilitarian ethics. Sam Altman has said the limits on AI development are essentially the limits on energy use. Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, and now a tech investor heavily involved in the AI space, says we’re not going to make our climate goals anyway, so we might as well go for broke so that super-intelligent AI can solve our problems.

Effective Altruists acknowledge climate change as a genuine phenomenon, but because of their focus on the trillions and trillions of human-like intelligences that could exist should we engage in interstellar travel (which, I remind you, involves literally destroying the stars of the universe to harvest their energy), they’re much more focused on that problem.

Who needs an Earth when you can be a brain in a jar?

While it’s true that the current energy footprint of AI use isn’t terribly out of whack with all kinds of day-to-day tasks we don’t think twice about (e.g., running a microwave), a recent report from the MIT Technology Review paints a bleak picture on the full designs of the industry should they be allowed to pursue their goals. Even if AI models become more energy efficient, the companies themselves are simply going to be used whatever energy is “saved” for their other projects. They operate without oversight or regulation and by the time we wake up from this nightmare it will be too late.

I don’t even want to talk about what they’re going to do to the groundwater that we use for trivial activities like drinking and growing food.

It’s tempting to see Jeff Bezos sending Katy Perry, Gayle King and Bezos’s fiancé into the lower reaches of space as a quirky side project of a guy with too much money, but Becker shows that there is a deep pathology and ideology at work among this loose collective of figures.

When we embrace an AI-mediated (or AI-dominated) future as inevitable, we are validating and advancing that ideology. It feels to me like this is something we should be much more vociferous about when it comes to resistance.

Unless you’re one of those people who want to be a brain in a jar, I suppose.

If that is you, seek help. I mean it.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Lincoln Michel’s “absolute blast” of a novel, Metallic Realms.

ICYMI, on Wednesday I published my Q&A with Debbie Urbanski about her new collection of stories (and related issues), Portalmania.

In other John Warner news, the (mostly) Allman Brothers cover band I play drums for had our first gig. This is us playing 60 seconds of “Midnight Rider.”

This was a great program on “literary legend,” Maxine Hong Kingston on KQED. (Thanks for the tip Alexander Chee.)

I made a cameo back with my friends McSweeney's in the Reviews of New Food (A category I created on the site better than 20 years ago), with my review of “Skittles POP’D Freeze Dried Candy.”

Also from McSweeney’s, “I’m a Trump-Loving Springsteen Fanatic and the Cognitive Dissonance Is Finally Catching Up with Me” by Lisa Borders.

Recommendations

1. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
2. Poor Deer by Clare Oshetsky
3. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
4. American Oasis by Kyle Paoletta
5. Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro

Patricia A. - Phoenix, AZ

The book that has come to mind feels like a bit of a risk, but it also just feels right. Sometimes you must listen to the Biblioracling instincts” Devil House by John Darnielle.

Just about every time I talk to Mother Biblioracle, she asks me how my book sales are doing. I tell her, honestly, that I don’t really know because I don’t keep track of these things because to keep track of these things is to inevitably risk disappointment.

But…I recently checked the Bookscan data that’s available to authors on Amazon and I can report that for four consecutive weeks sales have been higher than the previous week, which suggests some kind of word-of-mouth momentum for a book that was published back in February. If you haven't yet bought a copy of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, aren’t you worried you’re missing out?

Life is about experiences, folks. Go off and experience something worth your time on Earth today.

JW
The Biblioracle