Cameron Bell

Elon's Mars is not a backup for humanity. will most likely end humanity . He pitches it as insurance, so that if something catastrophic happens to Earth, consciousness continues somewhere else. That holds right up until the colony starts behaving the way every colony in history has behaved. The American revolutionaries were British, one or two generations out of Britain, with the same language and the same crown and three weeks of ocean in between, and they went for independence anyway. In Brazil it was the king's own son who declared the break. Mars will be up to twenty minutes away by radio, populated by people born there who share nothing with Earth but ancestry. It will break away, and once it has, it will arm. You might assume what follows is a Cold War, two rivals frozen in place by mutually assured destruction. But that logic belongs to Earth, where the same nuke you fire is likely to come back at you because we share one atmosphere, one climate, one biosphere. Restraint was never benevolence, it was geography. Two planets share none of that. You could end the other world entirely and your own sky would stay clean. And at twenty minutes each way there is no phone call, no crisis management, nobody to ask what that launch was. In time, uncertainty will make a first strike irresistible, as it nearly did in the Cold War on Earth, only to be stopped each time by proximity. Colonising Mars will end our children's lives.

sf is Hollywood for autistic people. We just dress worse and tell ourselves we are still the hippies who built the personal computer.