Grow up, Elon Musk: our future is not in space
One of my first memories is of the night when my parents woke me and my brother up to watch the moon landing. I remember the air of ceremony as we were ushered into the living room, my mother’s expression seeming to say “behold the marvellous world I have brought you into!” I remember the flickering images and tinny voices on our little black-and-white TV and my ultimate feeling of anticlimax when the event appeared to be over and we were sent back to bed. I was not quite two years old.
Later, like many kids, I became obsessed with space. I owned a book about the universe which I would pore over for hours in my bedroom. There were no glossy close-ups of the moons of Jupiter or panoramic vistas of Mars in it of course — this was the seventies after all — it was all artist’s impressions in drab inks, ending with the inevitable speculations on “man’s destiny among the stars”, the last page displaying an image of astronauts standing on an alien world, gazing into what seemed an infinite expanse of Future.
The caption under the illustration of this imaginary interplanetary mission placed it in the year 2001, perhaps echoing Stanley Kubrick’s famous movie set in that year. 2001! What would my life be like in that fantastic epoch, I wondered. It seemed as remote as the exotic astronomical objects described in the book. I couldn’t begin to fathom the marvels it might bring, but I set a mental alarm for my adult self to tell my wondering child self all about it when he got there. I imagined many things: robots and space ships, teleportation rays and time machines. But never that the biggest event to report from that year would be a terrorist attack.
I miss the Future. I’m not even sure when we lost it exactly. Maybe September 11, 2001 is not a bad guess. After all, it was always an American creation, and on that dark, sunny day, as the twin towers turned to dust and ashes before our eyes, the ship of American Manifest Destiny that had always appeared so invincible seemed to list sickeningly to the side. It was a dire omen for a century we had always imagined as the Sci-fi Century, but which with each year looked more and more like the Century of Collapse.
Remember the joke from the aughties: where are the flying cars? It captured the dawning realisation that the Future was well overdue, an awareness that eventually crystallised into the understanding that in fact it had always been an imaginary place, a Hollywood fantasy rendered so vivid by special effects that we had mistaken it for reality. So deep did the fantasy run that the very word “futuristic” still embeds it, conjuring images of a sleek, white world cleansed of all mess and disorder, a world of servile robots, seamlessly interlocking mechanical parts, holograms, air screens. And nowhere even the slightest trace of nature.
Nature never had a place in the Future, because nature was precisely the thing that we were striving so hard to transcend. The fantasy — never explicitly stated but fundamental — was of a utopia in which technology would not merely dominate nature, but replace it entirely. No longer would we suffer from the disorder, disease and decay of the natural world. We would live in cities of crystal or silver, pods of glass, perfect space bullets. Every moment of our gravity-free lifestyles would proclaim our victory over the ancient downward pull of the earth. Our skins would be shiny as plastic and never sag around the jawline, never wrinkle or blemish. We would never again have to look down because our feet would have left the ground for good. And we would never… yes you guessed it. Never die.
Because of course, when you think about it, that’s what all of this was about. It was a fantasy about transcending mortality. It was never really about space, because space is an absolutely terrible environment for humans. Anyone without a pressurised suit dies horribly in about 30 seconds. Cosmic rays punch holes through your cells and corrode your DNA. Your bones go soft, your muscles turn to mush. Nor is space exciting. In fact it’s inconceivably boring — endless light years of monotonous nothingness in which you could live out a million lifetimes in your galaxy-traversing space bullet and see nothing more interesting than more damn stars. And forget Mars. While a definite improvement on any other extraterrestrial planet in the solar system, Mars is still a hellhole. It is a desert so sterile and dry it makes the Sahara look lush. The pictures, which resemble familiar deserts on Earth, make it hard to imagine the cold, which is often sufficient to freeze carbon dioxide solid. And you can’t breathe there, of course. “BYO oxygen” is not a great advertisement for a holiday destination, let alone a permanent home.
No, space colonization is an awful, stupid idea. Understandings of human nature that have emerged since the turn of the century have only made this clearer. We need nature in order to be happy. One recent study showed how our brains have trouble making sense of cityscapes and man-made environments, and become confused and anxious when viewing them, but respond with immediate calm when gazing on scenes of forests and lakes. Other research has shown an association between lack of contact with natural environments and anxiety, depression and ill health. Garden plots and trees have a measurable impact on the wellbeing of people living in cities, and have even been shown to reduce crime in neighbourhoods where they are introduced. We are children of the natural world, our minds and hearts forever in the thrall of its ancient landscapes, sounds and smells, its sensual embrace. We are bound by its cycles and rhythms, including, however sadly, its season of decline and death. Living in sterile glass pods is an immature fantasy — and the truth is it would soon drive us stark raving mad.
When Elon Musk talks about colonising Mars as a “backup” in case things don’t work out here on Earth, he is not talking reason. He is speaking as a person in the grip of childhood Star Trek fantasies which being the richest man in the world has allowed him not to outgrow. However bad things get here on Earth, they will never compete for awfulness with Mars, and no difficulties we might face surviving here could possibly compare with the Herculean task of getting people to another planet and keeping them alive there, let alone healthy or happy. Musk and his fellow billionaire space cadets seem not to have absorbed the reality that the rest of us mere mortals have: that the future of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is dead, and we are desperate for a new one, because living without a future is killing us.
I am sad that the Future didn’t work out, just as I am sad that I never became a world famous musician or won the Nobel Prize. It’s not that I am really sad that those things didn’t happen so much as that I grieve my innocence, the sense of infinite possibility I once had. But this is called growing up. And in no longer striving to “slip the surly bonds of Earth” and accepting the limitations of my human life, I am also happier than ever before. I’ve seen through fame and prizes to grasp the fact that life is always made of life, whatever forms it takes, and transcendence eludes us except in the rarest moments of grace. I tend my garden and my young child and sometimes whistle in the mornings.
Perhaps this loss we face, this crisis of human destiny, parallels at the collective level the crisis that each of us faces in our individual psyche as we emerge from childhood and youth and suddenly perceive the arc of our lives, that it does not rise ever upward. Can we, as a species, accept our limits, as each of us must learn to do personally? The paradox is that this acceptance brings the happiness we always imagined to be glittering prize of transcendence, when in fact it was always right before us, living quietly in the humblest of things.
This thought gives me hope, despite the accelerating social and environmental instability all around us. The way forward is not up, but down. It’s in turning back to nature, not in turning our back on her. It’s in presence, not transcendence.
I think of that child a half century ago, toddling in to witness uncomprehendingly one of the greatest achievements of humanity: a man standing on the moon. Yet perhaps the most important picture from that heroic enterprise was not Neil Armstrong standing in that eerily monochrome world, but the view over his shoulder of the fragile blue planet in its breathtaking beauty and solitude. Perhaps having touched the sky, we can learn the wisdom of not chafing against the bonds of gravity, and attend once again to the field we are standing in, this place: our true home among the stars.