Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - No One Is Going to Mars: A Physicist Debunks Elon Musk's Mars Fantasy w/ Adam Becker

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co            Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz    The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future.  We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. We cover:Why humans will literally NEVER live on MarsThe biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solveThe truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plansWhy Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as realityHow AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrativeWhy investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it

There is no other planet. There is no planet B. This is what we've got, man. We evolved to live here. And there isn't anywhere else within reach and probably nowhere else at all that we could live. It seems like there's nothing more that tech billionaires are obsessed with Lely than conquering outer space. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and other tech CEOs constantly sell a tech-enabled version of the future, where trillions of humans are living in space, thriving on Mars, and being, being served by super intelligent AIs. But while these giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, the reality is these are fantasies built on pseudoscience and delusion.

Adam Becker is a physicist and journalist and he's the author of the new book, More Everything Forever. AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. His book breaks down Silicon Valley's unrelenting obsession with escaping death, building AI, and creating limitless growth. But what I found so interesting is how expert He dismantles the idea that we're going to go to Mars. This idea of going to Mars and living in space is a vision of the future that these tech billionaires

are currently leveraging to amass massive amounts of power and wealth. So today I'm really excited to have Adam breakdown from a scientist's perspective, why all of this is such complete nonsense, how Mars became this complete fixation for the ultra-walthy tech elite, and what we can actually do to make life better

for all of us here on Earth. Adam, welcome to power user. Oh, thanks for having me, Taylor. It's great to be here. So Adam, tell me, When did this obsession with expanding to other planets and interplanetary travel and conquering, et cetera, begin among these Silicon Valley tech leaders? That's a great question.

I think that the real answer is it began for them when they were kids. They read a lot of science fiction and saw it as a kind of roadmap or even a promise about what the future was going to hold. And that's not what it is at all. That's not what science fiction is. science fiction is, you know, it's a genre, right? It's a genre of writing and TV and movies and whatnot. And it's not about predicting the future any more than like murder mysteries are about how solving murders actually works.

But at the same time, you know, I guess when I think about science fiction, or I think of some of the most sort of compelling science fiction entertainment franchises. I mean, you mentioned Star Trek versus Star Wars in your book. In all of these visions of the future, humans have expanded beyond our planet. And it is this sort of fascination. I mean, we all look up at the stars at night if you can see them. You don't live in a big city like us. I mean, I think you're right that it probably kind of started when they were young. But when did it really start to like manifest in the products that they were creating

and the investments that they were making? Because I feel like a lot of these people got famous for things like Amazon. It did not start off with interplanetary travel. Yeah, absolutely. No. Jeff Bezos did not start. start off his empire with interplanetary travel, neither did Elon Musk. I guess what I mean when I say that it started with them as kids is with Bezos and Musk in

particular, it's very clear that it's something that they've been interested in their entire lives, even though it's not how they first started out making their money. You know, Bezos was talking about this stuff when he was in high school, and we know that because he gave a speech about it. And so I think in a way it's always been there. It's always been sort of lurking under the surface, even before they started explicitly pushing for space, that, you know, Bezos and Musk have always wanted this,

and they're not alone in this. And it's also something, you know, they're not particularly original, right? You know, it's not like Bezos and Musk came up with the idea of space colonization. This is something that has been in, like, the American psyche, I mean, for decades, if not a century, right? I mean, there's a reason it was in the science fiction that they were reading.

And that goes back to things like, you know, this American idea of the frontier and this European, you know, notion of colonialism, and this idea of, okay, maybe space is the final frontier and maybe we can do a colonialism again in space. And the fact is that that's not going to happen. So when do these colonial beliefs and, you know, desires start to really manifest in the products that they're developing and the investments that they're making? So with Musk, it happens pretty quickly. With Musk, he is one of the co-founders of PayPal. He has this startup that kind of gets eaten by PayPal. And that gets him his first, you know, big bundle of cash aside from the stuff, you know, that he got from his parents. And once he had that, he immediately goes off and starts SpaceX because he is obsessed with this idea of colonizing Mars. And it's always been there with him pretty, pretty out in the open. With Bezos, it didn't really show up in a serious way until he founded Blue Origin, which was in 2000. And, and he's always been there with him pretty, pretty out in the open. And so, he didn't really show up in the open. And. And so, he didn't. And so, he didn't. And And that, you know, made it clear what he had been after for a while.

Again, you know, he'd been talking about this stuff in high school. But if you go back and look at stuff that Bezos was saying when he started Amazon, right? Now Amazon is the everything store, but Amazon started out with books. And if you go back and look at what he was saying when he started Amazon, it's very clear that Jeff Bezos does not have any great love for books in and of themselves. He started Amazon out with books because books were. an easy thing to do by mail. There was media mail and you could return unsold merchandise to the publishers and get a full refund, which is very unusual, but that's the way it works in the publishing industry. And they're not perishable, right? You can just leave books in a warehouse

and they're not going to go bad or something like that. So it's an easy way to start out. I mean, if you go back and take a look at the very early days of Amazon, it's clear that Bezos was in there, not for the love of books, but to make it enormous. amount of money, he originally wanted to call the company Relentless. But Relentless.com was taken. And so he picked, you know, the river with the largest output in the world, Amazon. This was for him a means of getting a large amount of money in order to pursue his space streams.

Because, you know, if you want to go to space, you need a large amount of money. Yeah. It seems like, I mean, I was fascinated to know how early these companies were founded. Again, you mentioned, you know, back in 2000 is Blue Origin. SpaceX is just two years after that. And that is, I would say about 15 years earlier than I would have thought. I certainly didn't start hearing about this stuff until the 2010s. How did those companies evolve and how did the space dreams or multi-galaxy colonial expansion plans evolve, you know, from the early 2000s to the 2010s, maybe when a lot of this stuff started to enter

the public consciousness? I mean, the way that these companies, both of them really got off the ground was with government contracts, right? The space shuttle in 2000, it was already pretty clear by the early 2010s. I mean, the Columbia disaster was 2003 when the Columbia Space Shuttle, you know, was destroyed on reentry, killing all the astronauts on board. It was really awful. But even before that, it was clear that the space shuttle fleet was aging and that the U.S. would need other ways of getting stuff into space. This was the George W. Bush administration. people were even more interested than they had been during the Clinton years in public-private partnerships. And so these companies jumped in and said, oh, we can get stuff into space for less money than NASA.

And it turns out that because NASA's money is controlled by political process, that is not a terribly difficult thing to do, getting stuff into space for less money than NASA, because NASA's got some dysfunction that comes from the fact that they are constantly scrambling. for money from Congress and various presidential administrations. So these companies basically got off the ground and are still largely funded by government contracts, which is to say all of their money, especially in the case of Elon Musk, comes from us, comes from our taxes, which is one of the reasons why it's not just really awful and evil, but kind of rich and ironic, that Musk is now, you know, on this anti-Gexamination. government crusade when he is himself like the biggest welfare recipient in American history.

I mean, it's, it's hilarious, actually. It's also just so disturbing, like, kind of like you're talking about also just like the privatization of a lot of the space stuff and and how NASA and JPL, I've a friend that works at JPL, it's just like been decimated. There's layoffs after layoffs. It seems like in the 2010s, there was some flip or a breakthrough moment where this idea of going to Mars specifically is what people really started to coales around. You had Elon Musk, you know, giving out these shirts. It's an Occupy Mars. We had the Mars rover for the first time,

which went really viral and became this thing online. And I feel like a lot more of the public, you know, we used to talk about going to the moon. Suddenly a lot of that energy shifted to Mars. There's also maybe the fascination with like aliens and potential life and water on Mars entered that was something that was being covered more by the media. How did going to Mars emerge as this of goalpost. And is that something that came from Elon and Jeff Bezos or was it more of a grounds-up type thing? I definitely isn't something that originated with Musk. Mars has been this part of the American idea of the future in space for decades.

I mean, NASA landed the first probes on Mars in the 70s. Actually, the first Mars rovers were not in the 2010s. The very first Mars rover was in the 90s. And then the first like serious Mars rovers were in the 2000s, not the 2010s. Then there were more in the 2010s, absolutely. But I feel like it went viral in the 2010s. That's when we really started. Maybe with the video content, it just started to like spread more online.

I think in a way, Musk was kind of like a lightning rod. You know, there had been this idea of Mars in the, you know, public psyche, but Musk was like a focal point for it. The idea was Mars would happen eventually. And then Musk sort of broke into the public sphere really in the early 2010s as he started accumulating way more wealth and power and started saying, no, no, no, Mars is happening. It's happening now. I'm going to be the one to make it happen.

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So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams and post frequent updates about my work. My substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. I feel like also what Elon did and then sort of Jeff Bezos later with the consumer space travel is space always seemed like this thing that like astronauts and scientists would go into

and it's like the frontier and like everybody's kind of, you know, scared of it as well because is that you have to be really qualified and trained for years to go there. And I feel like what these billionaires did is say, like, actually, this is a consumer product or this could be a consumer experience. Like you, the consumer, can take off a space flight soon or like Elon Musk will go to Mars. Maybe you will live on Mars, you know? And it sort of like made it accessible almost where people started to think, oh, maybe I could live in a futuristic society.

It kind of like lets you put yourself in that vision. If you win a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-214.

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Activia contains over 1 billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out. Visitactivia.ca for more details. They're definitely into that. I think they weren't just selling space as a consumer product. They were selling a particular vision of themselves, right, Musk and Bezos, to the public as, we are the people who will lead you to the stars.

Don't you want to go to the stars? That's where the future is. And, you know, it's a lie not only because they're not going to lead us there, but that's not where the future is. Yes. Well, this is what I really want to dig into in today's episode because I think this whole vision of this like Mars colony, you know, interstellar space travel future. is built on sand.

And I really want to break that down for people. I was talking to someone, even this morning on another podcast, and I was saying, you know, we're never going to go to Mars. And he would not believe me on this. So let's walk through why this is not going to happen. I want people to really understand you will never go to Mars. We will never live there. We might not even visit.

Just to do it step by step. First of all, you've got to get there, right? And again, we might visit. We might send people there sort of the same way that we send people to the moon. but getting there is a lot harder than getting to the moon, and it's not just that it's farther away, it's that you have to wait for particular launch windows because the Earth and Mars have to be in the right positions

relative to each other. And how often do those launch windows come? About every 15 to 18 months, I think, something like that. So, you know, not that often. Whereas with the moon, you can just kind of go basically any old time, certainly, you know, several times a month, at least, because the moon orbits the Earth. Okay, so the launch issues are,

you know, automatically slow the timeline down. And it takes a lot of time to get there. To get to the moon takes about three days. To get to Mars takes about six to nine months, which is quite a bit longer. And what would that six to nine month journey look like for the people on board? Well, you would have to spend a lot of time

dealing with the two most dangerous parts about deep space travel, which is long-term exposure to zero gravity means that you're going to lose muscle mass and bones. density, which is going to be a problem when you get back to a planet with gravity, like, you know, Earth or Mars or whatever. So you're going to have to spend a lot of time exercising and really cramped quarters because, of course, the spaceship is not going to be big. You need it to be small in order to be able to send it at all.

And you need to make sure that you don't get exposed to massive amounts of radiation, because here on the surface of the Earth, we are protected from all the radiation in space, which comes from both the sun and deep space, by our thick atmosphere and our strong magnetic field. isn't to any of that in deep space. And Mars doesn't have either of those things either. And so you're going to be dealing with a lot of radiation on your way there while you're there and on your way back. And that's going to just be a continuing issue. So that's a problem. Yeah. So it seems like, I mean, just physiologically, humans might not be able to, you know, achieve this feat, certainly not very easily. I mean, the radiation stuff aside, I'm curious,

Like, has anybody ever lived in zero gravity for six to nine months? Like, do we have any sort of, like, have we done this testing on animals? Like, is there any sort of idea of what that could look like? So zero gravity for that long is something we've done. We've had astronauts on the space station for that long, and they're in zero gravity. They don't have to deal with the radiation as much because they're above the atmosphere, but they're still inside Earth's magnetic field. So they've still got about half of the shielding from radiation that we've got on the surface of the Earth, which is not bad.

So we know how to deal with that. But, you know, when they come back, it's not really easy for them to walk. They have to spend a lot of time exercising up there. But this is not even close to the biggest problem. I mean, it might not even be the biggest problem on the way out, right? You know, you've got all those people, you know, because you're going to have multiple people on this trip, living in close quarters. And yeah, they do that on the space station too, but the space station's way bigger than anything that we would be sending to Mars. So you've got all those challenges, and that's just before you get there.

Once you arrive, if you want to go to Mars and stay, not just plant a flag and turn around and go home, which would be difficult enough. If you want to go to Mars and stay, you have a lot more problems. Yeah, let's talk about some of those problems because to me this stuff is the most compelling. Because like you said, you know, maybe we do get there somehow. Maybe we shield ourselves from radiation. We figure out, you know, how to allow people to exercise 24-7, live in these close quarters for six to nine months and not completely lose your mind. What are some of the first problems you're going to encounter if you're trying to establish some sort of Mars colony? So you're going to run into a lot of problems.

The first problems that you're going to run into are that the gravity is still really low there. And so you're still going to need to get a lot of exercise in order to deal with, you know, muscle mass loss and bone density loss. And there's no air on Mars. They're not to speak of. Like there's something like less than 1% of the atmosphere on Mars that there is on Earth. And there's no oxygen in that atmosphere. And so you're going to need to bring equipment to, like, do chemical reactions to get oxygen out of the rocks on Mars there or bring a lot of oxygen with you. It's just going to be very, very challenging to get breathable air and the water that you need.

And then you've got the problems with radiation. And you've got the problem that the dirt on Mars is. toxic. And so, you know, one way to deal with the radiation problem is maybe, maybe you tunnel underground, you know, like build some sort of pressurized tunnel system and then you don't go on the surface very often. That sounds really grim to me, but maybe you could do that, except for the fact that because the dirt is toxic, you are going to be exposed to a lot of toxic dirt when you're building something like that. And of course, you've got to do that in spacesuits. Well, how toxic is the dirt? I mean, if you're in a space suit, it's not like the dirt would get it. in the space suit theoretically.

So what does it matter if the dirt is that toxic? Well, it's not going to get in the space suit, but it's going to get into the environments that you build for yourself on Mars, and you can't spend all of your time 24-7 in a space suit. And it could stick to the space suit. You're going to have a hard time getting it off of the space suit, getting it out of everything.

It's a very fine dust. And so it'll be there. And it'll get into your water. It'll get into your food. And it'll get into your body. You talk about in the book that this real realization of the toxicity of the dirt is what breaks the whole kind of mirage for you, where you're like, okay, this is actually just like a kind of potentially insurmountable. Like you mentioned, like, just the dust is so insanely toxic that there just would be almost no way to avoid it and people would die.

It's not even the biggest problem. It's just the one that sort of shook me out of my complacency that we were going to Mars. I saw that and I was like, wait, and I already know about all these other problems. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I don't think this is going to happen. Well, let's talk about some of those other problems, too. So say we do somehow solve the dust problem, right?

And we're able to eliminate every single speck of like fine particles, you know, which again, sounds impossible, especially if we're digging in the dirt, living underground on Mars. What other challenges are there? There's all sorts of other problems. Like if you want to build any sort of real structures there that would last for a long time, you're going to need machinery and that's going to be very difficult to get to Mars, right? I mean, the cost of getting stuff to Mars, the amount of time and trouble that it takes to do all of that, it's very, very difficult.

It's not even trouble. It just seems impossible. Like, if you need to drill hundreds of feet underground and construct and do basically have an entire construction zone on Mars, you are going to need to transport construction equipment. And somebody that spent a lot of time on job sites, like that is really a really, hard even in a rural area of America. You know, we're seeing like even the construction causes of some of these data centers or, you know, it's, it's difficult to get construction materials to places that we have roads to that are that are in our atmosphere. Like the idea

that we're going to get all this construction material and that the construction material itself won't be damaged, you know, in this whole thing. And it's so heavy. Like maybe that's like my dirt moment where I'm just like, okay, that this seems like insane. And also, I mean, to operate a lot of this equipment, you would need like hundreds of people as well, right? No, I mean, that to me is actually an even bigger barrier than the equipment. I mean, you want to have a real self-sufficient community on Mars, which Musk has talked about. You know, he says he wants us to have a self-sufficient colony on Mars that will survive, even if there's a disaster on Earth and the rockets, the supply rockets stop coming.

That means that you need to have enough people, not just to have. to operate all that equipment, but to build it in the first place. And the number of people that you would need on Mars to do that must keep saying he wants a million people on Mars. There's even stuff in his, you know, SpaceX IPO documents that says that, you know, he gets a bonus if there's a million people living on Mars, which, yeah, I know. But that is not enough, as it turns out, because you would need an entire independent high tech economy on Mars. And the number of people you need to do that is somewhere on the order of like 500 million or maybe even a billion people on Mars. And people can't have babies on Mars, right?

Because of the lack of gravity. Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to say. Yeah, exactly. We don't know. Like, it may not be possible to have babies in Martian gravity. Martian gravity is about a third of what we have on Earth. We do not know what effect that has on, you know, conception, gestation, birth. and you know development of fetuses in the womb and children once they're you know out in the world

we don't know what that does to them we don't know if it's survivable right because of course kids are bones are growing and gravity is really important to that and also it's just like so much of these ideas of going to mars too it sounds like people just have to be exercising 24-7 to like constantly not lose their like muscle mass and like bone density and everything i mean you talk about in your book this this theory of like oh well maybe we'll just keep all the kids you know under age 20 in some like pressurized vacuum like and at this point i'm just like god it would be so miserable like this life that you're describing is so radically different than i think the vision that musk is proposing or that jeff bezos but you know like this actually sounds hellish and i don't even

think it's it's ethical to subject a child to that life no i don't think so yeah i mean look musk says that he's going to solve all these problems by terror forming mars by making Mars's surface more like Earth, giving it an atmosphere, putting in a lot of plants and water and life and whatnot. That would be cool. You can't do it. Tell me why you can't do it. Yeah.

So, like, Musk says he wants to do it by melting the Martian ice caps. But there's just not enough stuff in those ice caps to give Mars even close to enough atmosphere. I mean, like, to give you an idea of how bad the atmosphere problem is on Mars, you would, if you were on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit on, you would have. asphyxiate while your saliva boiled off your tongue. So that's, that's bad. You would need to basically bring in massive amounts of air and water in order to make Mars a place that you could live on the surface of without a space suit even temporarily. And there's, there's not really a good

way to bring that stuff from Earth and the quantities needed. You would need to do something truly spectacularly cosmic, like, you know, get a bunch of comic. to impact on the surface of Mars to bring in the materials on their surface, that is a project that is probably not within the technological reach of humanity for centuries, if ever. It's just not a thing that's going to work. Yeah, to like attract the right comets with the right materials. And then also like the impact, of course, that that would cause.

Like, it seems delusional a lot of this stuff. I think it is delusional. And you could build a really... build a research base on Mars, probably. Like I say this in the book, it is probably possible. Like, you know, we don't know whether or not you can have kids on Mars without having them in like a centrifuge for, you know, 24-7. We don't know. But you could probably have like a research base with adults on Mars. That's probably something possible with existing or near future technology. But, you know, what would it be? It would be a few dozen people living in tunnels underground that never really go

outside, it would be incredibly depressing. And one of the things that I think I really want to impress upon people is a lot of people say that they want to go to Mars, that it would be cool to go to Mars. I think that they don't understand what it would mean to actually go to Mars. It would be really, really awful. Like you don't see people lining up to volunteer to live isolated alone in the Antarctic tundra. And yet that is so, so, so, so. much easier than living on Mars. Yeah, that's a really good actually sort of like comparison. And also, yeah, like the Arctic tundra.

It's our atmosphere. It's our, and you can see the sun. There's air. Yeah, exactly. You can breathe. Yeah. Maybe you'll see a penguin. It actually sounds so arrogant and egotistical to me.

You know, when you really start to break down, you really start to think about it. And sure, I'm sure there's like fantastical theories all over of like, oh, how we'll address this and address this. address this, but as you mentioned, like, at a certain point, you run up against scientific reality, and yet this vision persists. I mean, you mentioned in the space X IPO, which is about to be in all of our 401ks, Elon Musk has this clause that he'll get extra money, right? If a million people get to Mars, like he is, I feel like really mainstreaming this into the public consciousness, along with the help of people like Bezos, et cetera. And it seems really dangerous to me. Like,

it's like, we're really selling people this, like, lie. No, I think that's right. It is a lie. And it's a lie, again, it doesn't just sell people Mars. It sells people Musk, right? It sells Musk as a savior and gives him a perfect excuse for all of the stuff that he wants to do. You know, there's all of these safety violations and alleged safety violations that have happened at Musk's, you know, various industrial sites for SpaceX and Tesla.

And the reports that have come back from people who work there all, you know, pretty much say the same thing, which is that Musk keep saying, no, we have to ignore this stuff and keep our eye on the ball. And the ball that we're keeping our eye on is getting to Mars. Mars has to happen before Earth dies. It's like, okay, first of all, that's not going to happen. And second, what do you mean before Earth dies? Like, this is, this is to me one of the craziest things. And I guess I talk about this in the book, too. You know, Musk says, oh, you know, what if an asteroid hits Earth that's as big as the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And like, you know, the day that that happened, which was the worst day in the history of complex

life on Earth, that was a nicer day than any day on the surface of Mars ever. And we know that because mammals survived. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor. Friendly neighbor.

But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Talk to Banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day in theaters July 31st. I also think it's just so insidious of him to frame it that way. At the same time that he's building things like Colossus,

his massive gas-powered data center project that is polluting the atmosphere at, you know, skyrocketing rates. It is an ecological disaster. Like, he is part of, you know, the acceleration of the collapse of Earth. He is helping to decimate our atmosphere, you know, here while selling everybody on this sort of like utopian vision of Mars. Yes, I think that's exactly right. And I think there's this very sort of disposable logic at work there where like, oh, we can just use up Earth. And then when we're done, we move on to the next planet. And first of all, what are you, a locust? And second, there is no other planet. There is no planet B. This is what we've got, man. We evolved to live here. And there isn't anywhere else within reach and probably nowhere else at all that we could live. Well, it's also like, you know, we could fix this planet. Like for all of this investment, all of this like technological kind of investment and advancements and all the money that's being spent on again, like going to build some tunnel colony in Mars. You know, we could.

fix Earth. And I feel like he's almost writing Earth off. And this feels that feel this way with Bezos, too. It's like they've almost mentally like already written off the planet. And I think it also sort of manufactures consent for these data center projects for all of these other sort of like unethical ways that they're destroying, you know, Amazon's. I think Amazon has as greatly contributed to just the rise of like fast everything, you know, and and overnight delivery and expendable products, et cetera. All of this is what is killing our planet. And they're not seeking. to innovate, you know, our way out of any of that? No, no, I completely agree.

And I think that this idea of what the future looks like, that it inevitably involves colonizing space, that it inevitably involves advanced AI that will somehow solve all of our problems, is something that makes it seem like we have no choice in the matter? You know, both Musk and Bezos talk about how either we have to go out into space or we're going to die. Well, Musk says we're going to die. Bezos says we're going to stagnate and have to ration things and live under some really oppressive, you know, political regime. And like, okay, first of all, buddy, why are you talking about living under oppressive political regime when you're the one who lined up behind Trump?

But second, no, we can all live here on Earth and make this place a paradise. There is no reason why we can't do that except for you guys. The problem is not that Earth is going to get. hit by an asteroid, the problem is billionaires. Yeah, I know, which is it makes all of this stuff like so insidious. And yet I think they have really effectively like propagandized the public on a lot of this stuff to the point that like there's just so much that we already sort of take for granted that they've already kind of set up the terms of debate on these issues. And I'm wondering how we break out of that because you even the Musk fans today or the Bezos fans today like you know, you, you sort of criticize them on this stuff and you get these. bots and these people were replying saying, you know, oh, you know, you're anti-progress,

you're going to doom us to this miserable life, like stuck on Earth. And I don't know how to break it out. Like, I don't know how to give people that sort of like Mars dust moment that you had where you're like, okay, wait, hold on a second. None of this makes sense. None of this is possible. And it's a very convenient kind of, I don't want to say distraction, but kind of like narrative that insulates them from accountability here on Earth.

I mean, this is why I wrote the book that I did, right? I wrote that book. I wrote more everything forever in order to break people out of this stuff, right? Not just narratives around space, but also narratives around AI and the singularity and whatnot that are also tied up with all of this, you know, billionaire depiction of the future. And I don't have a better answer than that right now. If I did, I would have done that. Everyone read Adams book.

Yes. I'm trying. But yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I think like, I mean, one thing that I think is helpful to in your book, too, is it's not just space that they're selling people on. It's like, it's all of these visions of this like alternative futuristic like world because AI plays a big role in it all too. And it's all this, you know,

it's this sci-fi stuff, right? It's all sci-fi stuff. We're all going to have these AI servants that do whatever we want for us and we can live lives of leisure and they will solve all of our problems and AI will solve global warming. That one's always been particularly confusing to me because, you know, the climate crisis is not something that we don't know. how to solve, right? And it's not something that we don't have the technology to solve. I mean, yeah, there's other technologies that we could make that would make it even easier, but like it's primarily a political problem. Like, we have really cheap green energy. We just need to deploy a lot more of it and get people to stop using fossil fuels. That's technologically not

difficult. It's socially and politically difficult. But these guys are really interested in reducing everything to a technological problem. And AI is a great sort of rhetorical trick for claiming that you can, you know, you can solve all the problems of the world with this one weird trick. You just make the AI bigger. And of course, to make the AI bigger, we need fossil fuels. We need to destroy the planet. I mean, look, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, venture capitalist, tech billionaire. He said, like, sometime, I think, in late 2024, he said, well, we're not going to meet our climate goals anyway. So really to solve the climate crisis, our best bet is to burn lots of fossil fuels to make AI go as fast as possible, and then AI will solve the climate crisis for us.

I'm like, buddy, first of all, that makes no sense. And second, if you did that and somehow did build some sort of AI Oracle and turned it on, you know, after building it with a bunch of fossil fuels, the first thing you would say is, oh, you wanted to avoid the climate crisis? You shouldn't have built me. Yeah. I think of like, I mean, it's also nonsensical where you even have that guy, Daniel Figella, who I believe it's him who wants to literally accelerate the heat death of the, universe like oh god we have to just it could sort of consume as much energy as possible just to get to aGI and then that will solve everyone's problems that it's like well that's very conveniently aligned with your business interests and you've got like yeah the the effect of acceleration is saying this

people like yome verdun and and stuff like that yeah it's absolutely bonkers nonsense and speaking as a physicist they don't understand the physics i feel like that must be particularly infuriating i am not a science person obviously but to even I mean, to me, like, the Mars question is just such a good one because, I mean, as a physicist, but also just as a scientist, clearly you can kind of see the fault in all this, but I think as a member of the public, like, I'm like, wait, you're right. It does fall apart under the lightest scrutiny. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And yet, you know, it persists. Yeah. No, I mean, like, look, in a sense, this book and all the stuff I've been doing lately around it and with my new podcast and everything else is just,

me out there saying, hey, the emperor has no clothes. We need another plan because these guys have no idea what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's really important to remember that as they're, you know, making their billions through IPOs and expansion of their businesses, et cetera. Well, Adam, thank you so much for chatting with me. I really encourage everybody to listen to Dreaming Against the Machine Adam's podcast and read his book, More Everything Forever. It's so fantastic. I literally like consumed it all within like I think 24 hours. But thank you so much for for joining me today and for chatting. Thank you so much for having me, Taylor. This was a pleasure. All right. That's it for this week's episode. If you like the show, please, please, please support me

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