🔴👽 Mars Must Be Destroyed
The Red Planet’s hold on our subservient imagination is a bigger threat than any invasion.
Welcome to your regular weekend Dark Markets essay. I am in the absolute trenches of formatting the bibliography for Stealing the Future, a thankless and repetitive task that has been incredibly streamlined by Zotero, the same citation software I used 15 years ago for my dissertation. Highly recommended (and not an ad!).
This column, like so many of my ideas, was worked out in part with help from my wife, the painter Georgia Hourdas. Thanks, babe.
This week I want to dig just a bit into one particularly revealing passage of last week’s interview between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. Thiel had some very interesting comments about the project to colonize Mars: comments that make it clear our real goal, as a human species, should be to destroy the Red Planet. Possibly with nuclear weapons, possibly with some sort of deep-core mining robot, I’m not really a details guy.
The essence of Thiel’s comments are an admission that Elon Musk’s longtime hypebeast vision of colonizing Mars is explicitly about creating a new horizon for their shared politics of totally deregulated elite freedom – a kind of Epstein Island of the Spirit, if you will. The Mars project is characteristic of the deceptive, and even self-deceiving, nature of the techno-utopian and accelerationist projects. It parallels, on a larger scale, Musk’s use of the fictional Hyperloop concept to sap support for California’s high-speed rail project, which threatened his core business selling cars.
The goal is not actually to build anything, but to wave the possibility of some future that is tantalizing enough to stop any collective political effort to improve the present.
“There’s nowhere to go”
The relevant passage comes just after Douthat asks whether Thiel has “stopped funding politicians,” to which Thiel revealingly replies that politics is “incredibly toxic” because “it’s zero sum.”
Characterizing politics as zero-sum is utterly, objectively wrong: American politics has successfully grown the economic pie for the past century and a half. The recent sense of stagnation that people like Thiel complain about is the result of he and other oligarchs successfully stealing all of that increase for themselves, and then some. Thiel’s comment reflects the already-foreclosed thinking that actually structures techno-utopians’ evocations of a sparkly future: their real goal is not wealth and innovation for all, but the capture of resources by the most powerful.
The point, Thiel makes explicit here, is not to actually colonize Mars, physically. Even more than the Hyperloop, that’s because it’s quite literally impossible: Mars has no magnetosphere, so surface radiation will likely kill even bacteria.
This was never going to be an actual “libertarian paradise,” and Thiel (who while still a lightweight is many times smarter than Musk) relays with palpable mirth watching Elon realize this:
Thiel: … this is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024, and we had all these conversations. I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said: If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country. And then Elon said: There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go.
[I thought] Wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore. 2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars — not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project; it was building an alternative. And in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist U.S. government, the woke A.I. would follow you to Mars …
Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.
Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?
Douthat: What does Mars mean?
Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?
Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk. [Props again to Douthat for this little barb at Elon’s demented autoeugenics agenda.]
Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.
Insert ominous cinematic music at the end there. Because if they can’t just escape to Mars, these people will certainly try to impose their vision of Mars on the home front.
Government-Funded Libertarianism
“Escape to Mars” is on its face a silly fantasy, and not just in a technological sense. The most obvious irony, of course, is that SpaceX’s Starship Rocket is funded by the U.S. government. SpaceX is able to plow billions into this fantasy because its government contracts for satellite launches have been so lucrative.
More broadly, this is just in addition to Musk’s broader reliance on government, including particularly for Electric Vehicle credits – the only reason Tesla was profitable in some recent quarters, a dependency highlighted by Tesla’s material and stock-market collapse in the wake of Musk’s pathetic falling-out with Donald Trump. Trump’s threats to pull Elon’s subsidies might be the only thing scarier to him than Black people.
As Thiel points out, there are both scientific and political goals available for selling the Mars bait-and-switch. Musk has been talking about Mars since at least 2001, and in fact Mars seems to have been a key part of the path to building SpaceX. For much of that duration, including the early days of Starship itself, Mars seemed mostly to be what Thiel here calls “a silly science-tech project.”
That is, Elon’s Mars was for a long time driven and framed as the kind of optimistic quest the techno-utopians like to publicly pin their identities to. Musk thought he could do privately what NASA in the 1950s and 1960s did with vast public support. And like the moon missions, SpaceX as a whole and the research driving Starship have produced real corollary innovations, even if we never actually get to Mars.
Some delusions, some hopes and dreams, are good.
But when Thiel dismisses this as a “silly science project,” he tips his hand that this isn’t actually the point at all. Thiel is perhaps most known for his frantic demand that the technology industry needs to be more focused on building things like flying cars, but in fact, that’s all cover for selling an entirely different fantasy - the fantasy that society can thrive on pure atomized deregulation. Thiel emphasizes that Mars is a political project – a reality that Musk himself has become more transparent about as he became more openly right-wing and racist.
The Mars envisioned by the Elon Musk of 2025 is one without immigration, without worker protections, without a democratic government to protect average people from anything at all. Remember that Musk’s derangement really began in 2020, when he went ballistic fighting COVID-related closures of Tesla’s factory in California. Remember also that Tesla has had worker injury rates above the broader auto industry. Safe to assume there’s no OSHA on Elon Musk’s Mars.
And if Mars really is just a campground for oligarchs, why should the rest of us want it? Who will you be on the Martian colony, after all, but a manual laborer shadowed by the constant threat of instant death? Or a force-dispensing supervisor working under extremely dangerous conditions? Or a drone operator eating out of one tube and shitting into another?
If this is his mask-off moment on Mars, is Thiel actually sincere about his broader demand to do more physical science and more innovation? We already know he’s a die-hard opponent of mass education, and more generally of the freedom of information. At the same time, he has continued to privately fund apps, not flying cars, while very actively supporting the defunding of public science research. So his actual behavior doesn’t seem to be very well aligned with his professed goal.
In short, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, like most technological accelerationists, doesn’t have a coherent theory of innovation, because that’s not the actual goal. “Innovation” has instead become a kind of metaphorical political cudgel. Invoking frontiers including the promise of Mars, self-driving cars, and most obviously the threat of being “outcompeted on A.I.” by China is not actually about competing or advancing in any of those fields, all of them canards to varying degrees.
The real point is to evoke a constant mix of far-off fears and hopes in a credulous populace, and leverage it to get what you really want in the present – tax cuts and deregulation, no different from the base desires of a jet-ski dealership owner in Akron.
So perhaps nuclear weapons won’t suffice. What we really need to do is destroy the Mars inside each of us, the cheap fantasy of an escape from politics, and each other. There are few ideas more toxic to rescuing democracy from its current death spiral.