[ad_1]
In one corner is the executive director of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, the richest in the world. In the other, the South African entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Their respective companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, compete to become the dominant force in travel in the commercial space.
Although Bezos and Musk started friendly, the rapid success of SpaceX inspired a bitter feud through Twitter's patent battles and insults.
Despite their personal antipathy, both men are fed by the Messianic conviction of ensuring the long-term survival of humanity by establishing permanent settlements in the solar system. Bezos has the vision of sending astronauts back to the moon, before creating floating space habitats that can accommodate millions of people. According to Bezos, this migration is necessary to prevent the Earth from stagnating and dying as we exhaust its resources. The dirty industry will be moved into space, while the proposed O'Neill circular platforms will apparently create a new kind of enlightened human being, giving birth to the "thousand Einstein".
Musk has a darker vision of the future, perhaps because he grew up in Pretoria. He sees the Earth as irretrievably doomed to failure, be it global warming, disordered artificial intelligence or simply a nuclear war in the old. This requires establishing a colony on Mars, which can preserve human civilization and eventually return to restore order on the post-apocalyptic Earth. It is interesting to note that Musk's idea that a small group was retreating into a hostile environment to survive the impending disaster inadvertently paralleled the Manson family's plan to overcome the apocalypse by hiding in the Valley of Death.
Do whatever you want with it.
A large part of the economic and scientific press presents the Musk-Bezos feud as a good thing, which will in some way ensure a promising future in space. But this optimistic view ignores how these two plutocrats get rich as a result of terrifying exploitation based on the Earth. And their projects are dreaming as we live in a climate and ecological disaster transforming our home world into an inhospitable foreign environment.
Even if they act once in space, Musk and Bezos are objectively terrible leaders here on the surface. Amazon is known for its anti-union aggression tactics and deplorable working conditions in its warehouses. Despite its platitudes on environmental remediation, Bezos is heavily invested in the oil and gas industries. At a recent shareholders 'meeting, he refused to appear on the scene to listen to his employees' fears about climate change.
Musk is also anti-union, while workers in his factories have spoken of terrible suffering and stress. In fact, he uses his self-proclaimed role as savior of humanity to legitimize exploitative practices. Ashley Vance, his biographer, writes, "When Musk sets unrealistic goals, verbally abuses employees, and works hard at them, it's clear he's on the Mars agenda."
Constantly hearing about his own genius has propelled Musk's narcissism to cosmic proportions. Musk slanders less powerful people on Twitter and publishes incredibly funny little gimmick rap songs so as not to lose the spotlight. As you read about him, you have the impression of becoming a very talented nerd-king, but unstable and deeply miserable, desperate for the constant recognition of the world. Although he seeks to fly to the void of space, Musk seems blind to the screaming spiritual emptiness that is at the heart of his very existence.
Bezos and Musk are very stingy people, aware that there are dollars in the heavens. The asteroid belt, for example, abounds with rare and exploitable minerals. The current bromide in the world of technology wants the first trillionaire to come from space trading.
The elephant that struggles in the room is the reality of imminent climate catastrophe. We are already beginning to see its ravages around us and, as warned by the United Nations last year, there is very little time left to convert to renewable energy systems and avoid a complete ecological collapse.
As our self-proclaimed saviors, you might think that Musc and Bezos would like to use their skills and resources to face this unprecedented existential threat to human existence. But there is also no particular urgency in the face of climate degradation. Musk has made progress in the field of renewable energy with Tesla, but it remains very focused on an elite market. If he was really concerned about preserving humanity, Musk would direct resources to fund immediate and open source research and engineering in order to survive climate change. God, he could probably fix Eskom. Instead, he throws cars into space as a publicity stunt.
But from a cynical and realistic point of view, it makes sense that the super-rich do not care to deploy the ecological horror. Quite simply, they are confident of being protected. The neoliberalism of recent decades has been the scene of the greatest concentration of rising wealth in the history of mankind, creating a transnational class of oligarchs free from any political constraint or imposition. . As the scientific research presented in the journal Nature has recently shown, the rich are both the main drivers of carbon emissions and the most protected of the new reality of the extreme climate.
Despite their philanthropic rhetoric, Musk and Bezos are ultimately concerned with shaping the future in their own image. As journalist Christian Davenport explains, they see themselves as "barons of space" controlling the course of the twenty-first century. The future that they envision is much like a new high-tech feudalism, in which they are the transhuman pharaohs creating artificial paradises while the rest of the world is disintegrating into wars of heat, thirst and desperation. resources.
Space exploration is a commendable business. This taught us not only about the universe in which we live, but also about a considerable understanding of how our planet works. The space should amaze us in front of the beautiful and terrifying strangeness of the cosmos of which we are a part. And, as the astonishing picture of the black hole at the beginning of the year shows, the harshness of space is a stark reminder of the scarcity and fragility of life on our planet. There is no plan B or escape for us – it's the only house we have.
Maybe someday, humans will migrate to the outside. But for now, the real challenge is here on Earth. The same system of endless and rapid growth that destroys the environment has allowed Bezos and Musk to become so rich that they can use their wealth to realize their dreams of dominating space.
To survive the next century, our species will need all its ingenuity and creativity to create more equitable, freer and cleaner political, economic and technological systems than anything we have today. It may be impossible and we are doomed. But the dream of regenerating our planet, our societies and ourselves has both an existential grandeur and a human warmth that is lacking in the ridiculous dreams of Musk and Bezos to become emperors-god of the solar system, or any other narrative of science fiction that they surely tell. themselves in private.
When I see Musk's plans for the future, I do not see the culmination of any human enterprise. I see an incredibly wealthy South African trying to sell you a golf course on Mars.
Christopher McMichael is a writer, researcher and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Political Studies from Rhodes University.
[ad_2]
Source link