by DAN FALK
In “More Everything Forever,” Adam Becker unpacks the flaws in the dreams of tech pioneers to reshape the world to come.
Elon Musk once joked: “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a “back up” planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable.
Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 — and he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroids to build giant space stations. “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he has said.
Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker. In “More Everything Forever,” Becker details a multitude of flaws in the grand designs espoused not only by Musk, Andreessen, and Bezos, but by Sam Altman, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and an array of tech billionaires and future-focused thinkers whose ambitions are transforming today’s world and shaping how we think about the centuries to come.
Becker targets not only their aspirations for outer space, but also their claims about artificial intelligence, the need for endless growth, their ambitions for eradicating aging and death, and more — as suggested by the book’s subtitle: “AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.”
Becker finds the idea of colonizing Mars easy to deflate, explaining that dying may in fact be the only thing that humans are likely to do there. “The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison,” he bluntly puts it. He notes that we have a hard time convincing people to spend any great length of time in Antarctica — a far more hospitable place. “Mars,” Becker says, “would make Antarctica look like Tahiti.”
The solar system’s other planets (and moons) are equally unwelcoming, and star systems beyond our own solar system are unimaginably distant. He concludes: “Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities — not now, not soon, and maybe not ever.”
Becker targets not only aspirations for outer space, but also claims about artificial intelligence, the need for endless growth, ambitions for eradicating aging and death, and more.
Becker sees space colonization as not only unrealistic but also morally dubious. Why, he asks, are the billionaires so keen on leaving our planet as opposed to taking care of it? He interviews the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, who sees their focus on killer asteroids and rogue AIs —and their seeming disinterest in climate change — as an evasion of responsibility. “The idea of backing up humanity is about getting out of responsibility by making it seem that we have this Get Out of Jail Free card,” Walkowicz says.
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