Tech Won't Save Us - Elon Musk Isn’t Saving Humanity w/ Manu Saadia

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Manu Saadia to discuss the roots of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ visions for space, and why they serve the billionaires’ need for control, not the betterment of humanity.Manu Saadia is the author of “Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek.”Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Elon Musk said he’s accumulating wealth to make life multiplanetary. Jeff Bezos said he can only think to spend his Amazon “winnings” on space.In “Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity,” Daniel Deudney outlines the two space paradigms discussed in the episode. You can also read a review of it.Werhner von Braun, who was key to the US Apollo Program, was a Nazi scientist who came to the US after World War II.Carl Sagan said “there is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. … For the moment, Earth is where we make our stand.” Elon Musk laughed at this and claimed Mars is the alternative, but Shannon Stirone explained why he is very wrong.Salvage published an editorial on the immediate need to repair the damage done by capitalism.Science fiction mentioned: Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Heinlein.Support the show

When you live in space, you're entirely at the mercy of life support systems. Your entire survival depends on manufactured artificial technologies. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Manu Sadia. Manu is the author of Treconomics, the Economics of Star Trek. And in this week's conversation, we talk about the approach of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to space and space exploration, and how they form a narrative of how we should be engaging with space that is not designed to serve scientific ends, but is focused around domination and colonization and these drives that throughout human history we can see are not the things that should be

determining our way forward. Instead of being focused on colonizing Mars and building space colonies, maybe what we should be focusing on is how to learn as much as we can about space while ensuring that we solve our problems here on Earth before we try to head out into the stars and plant our flag on other celestial bodies. I had a great time chatting with Manu, and I think you are really going to like this episode. Before we get into it, I also wanted to thank the patrons who are supporting us on Patreon. This week we passed an important milestone. More than 120 people now support the podcast on Patreon with a monthly donation, and cumulatively those now amount to more than $500 a month, which is really fantastic. The goal now is to use those funds to put together a new website

for the podcast that will have more information on the guests and the critical work that they do, but also to have transcripts of these episodes so that people who don't want to listen to the podcast or people who want to go back and look it over after they've listened to these conversations to pull out the pieces that they thought were interesting and enlightening that they can go to the website and do that. So thank you to the people who are supporting the show. And if you're not a supporter yet, and you're liking the work that I do on the show, and you want to ensure that I can keep doing it and kind of expanding the critical work that is being done through Tech Won't Save Us, please consider going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and joining supporters like Pete Ward and Jake from Durham, North Carolina with a monthly

contribution. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to find out more about that, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. And obviously, if you like the show, please leave a five star review on Apple podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. So with that, enjoy this week's conversation. Manu, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, how you doing? I'm well, and I'm really excited to chat with you today. You know, obviously, we have been corresponding on Twitter for quite a long time, long time, sharing our dislike of Elon Musk and a bunch of these other kind of tech bullshit things.

You could even say we're comrades. Absolutely. these space fantasies, and maybe how we should really be thinking about space as leftists, as people who are really focused on and interested in the well-being of, you know, humanity, right? And so I wanted to start just to dig into something that happened very recently. Musk tweeted the other day, I am accumulating resources to help make life multi-planetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. You know, obviously, this tweet comes at a time when a lot of people are struggling during this pandemic. And at the same time as Musk has vastly increased his

wealth because of you know, the bubble in Tesla stock, among other things. So when you read this tweet, what came to your mind? The facepalm. There's a lot to unpack in that, you know, intellectually speaking. You know, it's a philosophical purpose to be a philosophical statement. So it's legitimate to actually take it as a philosophical statement and try to unpack it. You know, I'm not in his head. I don't know what his intentions are. I mean, he's a clown. He's a very rich clown. But he's a clown on Twitter.

That's his personality. I think he would prefer meme lord, actually. True, true, true. Meme lord. So on the one hand, you know, it's hard to separate the seriousness of the statement and the way it circulates in culture. So there's that. And it circulates in culture mostly because Mr. Musk has such a large following. So that's on the one hand.

And on the other hand, what we know of the character the guy plays on Twitter is that he's a clown. And sometimes a sad clown, you know, like COVID will be done and over within a week or something at current rates. And that was like back in March, I think, or April of 2020. So how do you deal with these clowns? That's one of the first things that came to mind. It's like, how do you deal with these clowns? How do you engage with their statements? Given also that we are nobodies? We are people, but we're nobodies in the grand scheme of things, because it's people like Musk and Bezos who have access and accumulate vast resources that have effectively the power. So what we're discussing here are things and decisions that are already made,

and not on our behalf. Because in the case of people like Bezos and Musk, it's proof that democracy and capitalism are not only incompatible, but they are enemies. So we're going to discuss this, but you have to realize that this is done from a place of powerlessness because of the way the world is organized. So that's also one of the things that come to mind. It's like, I can say whatever I want about Elon Musk. It doesn't matter. And it's not that I have any particular insight that's special about it, but it's more because of the way power is distributed or unequally distributed in the world. Yeah, no, I think that is a fantastic point, right?

And I think that was really shown when Jeff Bezos made a similar statement a couple of years ago, when he specifically said that the only way he could see to spend his Amazon winnings was on space travel, right? And that really shows that there has been this massive distribution of wealth in the direction of the Jeff Bezos's and the Elon Musk's. And that gives them a significant degree of power in determining not necessarily the futures that we will achieve, but the kind of things that we're going to set our sights on as a society, because they have the power to direct us in that direction. They are big, big voices in a conversation that is mostly one way.

So there's that. And on top of that, the thing that really irks me is remember a few years ago when SpaceX and Elon just sent that Tesla into space. They're like, oh, it's a prank and, you know, it's kind of a valentine to all the Tesla employees and this and that. It's, you know, innocuous. But the thing is, it is not because that hot rod and the whatever stupid mannequin in it, it's going to outlive humanity. So this is one of the things that will leave to the universe. So now imagine if future archaeologists stumble upon this thing. What are they going to think of it? What kind of trace is it that we're leaving when we're

sending basically the midlife crisis car that you drive on the freeway to impress the other wage slaves. It's like, this is our parietal art. This is the equivalent of Lascaux, you know, or the caves in South Africa. And this is what we leave. Okay, so there's that. But on top of that, the fact that this is the whim of a single individual who just want to pull a prank. So what we're leaving in space is junk and the result of the sort of like juvenile imagination of somebody with too much money. And he decided that he would speak on behalf of humanity. He's not speaking for me. This is not what I want to leave to the stars and to the billions of years that

will come after us. This is not who I am. This is not who I want to present as. So it's a problem. It's a problem of power. And it's a problem of the spectacles of power and who has a voice and who doesn't. They say history is written by the victors, right? Perhaps we'd be better off if it were written by the victims. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that's a fascinating way to make us think about this conversation, right? And to make us think about the way that these space kind of discourses are made and who gets to decide what kind of space things that we talk about, right? Because we have Musk making these decisions

for all of us, but that doesn't mean it's the only way that we can approach space exploration. This notion from Musk and Bezos that we need to colonize the stars, that we need to actually have humans going out into space to do this work is not the only way that people think about how we should interact with space and what our approach to space should be. So I was hoping that you could kind of outline some of these different approaches to space and different ways of thinking about how we should be engaging with space and why the approach of Musk and Bezos, this one kind of centered around colonization, is probably not the one that we should be pursuing. There's a book that came out recently by a great scholar

named Daniel Dudney, and it's called Dark Skies. And it's all about the future of space exploration. And that person is a rather serious and important scholar. And he's part of the people who sit on these panels to decide on future policy. So he's really very much an influential person. And he's a very good scholar. And the book is 500 pages. It's very extensive and exhausting. But he points out something very important, I think, is that there are two paradigms in the way we conceive of space exploration.

And on the one hand, there is the von Braun-Syolkovsky paradigm. So Werner von Braun and Konstantin Syolkovsky. So people from the 20s and 30s who viewed the idea that humanity had to jump into deep space and colonize and multiply and settle everywhere. And that it's almost the species mission. That's one paradigm. And so the forced march towards technological improvements so that we can build rockets,

so that we can settle the moon and then Mars and all that. And I think the spreading the light of consciousness to the universe, I think it's Sierkowski. I'm not so sure, but I think it is. But it points to that, what Russians call cosmism. So it's this idealistic ideology of humans spreading to the stars. And von Braun, who came from a different background, Prussian aristocrats turned Nazis. He was very much into that as well. And that was the sort of driving force behind his work. First for Hitler, because Hitler was like, yeah, von Braun's a genius, like give him all the

money to build his rockets. And von Braun was like, okay, there's a war now, but then later on with all that progress we made during the war, we'll be able to conquer the stars. So he did not do it with Hitler, he just did it with the people who had arrested him and were very much keen to leverage his engineering prowess. Would he have been one of the Nazi scientists or leaders who then moved to the United States after World War II? Oh, very much so. von Braun was basically the guy behind the Apollo program. He was the guy. He did something in the 50s that was kind of very smart, where he hooked up with Walt Disney,

and they put together a TV program, Men's Race to the Stars, or Men's something, something to the stars was watched by 50 million people at the time. And it was the sort of diorama of rockets going to the moon and Jupiter and this and that. This was in the context of the 50s, you know, sort of resurgence of science fiction. And so it helped cement this sort of imagination of a so-called, you know, new frontier for American ingenuity. And that this idea that, you know, technological progress is here to push us far beyond the reaches of our current Lebensraum, if you will. But you find traces of that in the arguments for colonizing space, because space colonization is often couched as a sort of life insurance for the species. Elon Musk himself, like he says that, you know, quite often that we need

to be an interplanetary species so that if Earth fails, then there will still be, you know, some refugees somewhere in space on Mars that will be able to continue the species. And so our precious bodily fluids will not go to waste. That life insurance thing is absurd on its face. The only real threat to the biosphere and the habitability of Earth is human industry and lack of coordination. The average lifespan of a mammal species is a million years. So it's on average. Maybe we'll do more, maybe we'll do less. But mammal species, on average, live a million years.

So we're about, you know, 200,000 to 400,000 years into our run. So, you know, that gives us a lot of time still. Then probably Earth's systems will stop when plate tectonics stops. So when the internal radioactivity of the Earth is depleted by decay. And that's people I've seen 600 million to 800 million years. So, you know, like there's plenty of time before things go, I would say, shit on Earth. But, you know, there's a lot of time before Earth becomes like Mars. And right now, it's not.

Right now, it's like the most habitable spaceship. So the life insurance thing, okay, so yeah, asteroids, whatever. If we're so good with rockets, then finding an asteroid on the course to Earth and knocking it off with just a little nudge, that would actually be a worthwhile use of resources. The current system for surveying errant asteroids is woefully underfunded. That would be an actual worthwhile use of resources and it wouldn't be that expensive. So the life insurance thing doesn't work. But it's grandiose, right? It is grandiose. And it's also, it shows prudence on the side of those who utter these words, because it shows that, oh, I'm thinking ahead.

I'm a forward thinker. I'm a visionary. I want to manage the risk on behalf of all of humanity. Well, the current very pressing risks are not of that nature, and they're mostly the result of the lack of coordination or the spontaneous coordination of the market, which doesn't really work when it comes to public goods such as the atmosphere. So that's one paradigm. Okay, so we're going to circle back to the question of paradigm. So this is one paradigm, like we need to go out. This is the species mission. We've always explored. We're explorers. We're going to circle back to the question of paradigm. So this is one paradigm. Like, we need to go out. This is the species mission.

We've always explored. We're explorers. We're settlers. That's the paradigm, the von Braun-Siolkowski paradigm. And then Dudney points out the other paradigm, which is the Carl Sagan paradigm. And I think it does justice to Carl Sagan. And Carl Sagan, you know, we all know who Carl Sagan was. A great scientist and somebody

very gifted with attracting funds for his projects. So that's also part of being a great scientist. And Carl Sagan, he had this view that we should use our technology to explore for the sake of science, because in the sort of seemingly purposeless, seemingly useless acquisition of knowledge, because, you know, there are no economic purposes to sending probes or rovers to planets. And through that practice of looking at the world and the universe, we will learn a lot about the universe, but also about ourselves. Meaning, you know, if we can find

traces in the layers of Mars, we can find traces of fossilized microorganisms. Then what we learn from that is something very deep about our own places in the universe, about the frequency of the appearance of life spontaneously on planets, about the conditions which lead to evolution, about how long can life survive and thrive. So this is the means by which we learn about the light of consciousness in the universe, actually. And Sagan, he was very adamant about being observers and being very careful and being very ginger about it. And this was really born out of a deep commitment and very earnest commitment to know more, not just about the nature, but about ourselves, because we are part of nature. We are part of the cycles of nature.

That's ultimately the Sagan paradigm. So, you know, you send little probes, over-engineered, extremely well-built, that can last for, you know, decades. And what you discover with these probes is mind-boggling. Think about what the Voyagers, these two little things, 1973 technology. And they're still, you know, they're beyond the termination shock. So the place where the sun's rays protect from the interstellar medium. So they're in the interstellar medium,

these two probes. And they've shown us incredible things about Saturn and Jupiter and the outer solar system. Now there's New Horizons. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, the New Horizons flew by Pluto

and it was launched before Pluto was downgraded to a planetoid. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, like the new horizon flew by Pluto and, you know, and it was launched before Pluto was downgraded to a planetoid. But what they found on Pluto was these geological formations. These are spikes of ice. So it's not water ice, but I think it's nitrogen ice or helium. So it's spikes of ice that you only find in Chile on Earth. And they're the result of movements of ice and movements of the ground. And so this is extremely eerie because does that mean that Pluto is geologically active? We don't know. And the question about is Pluto geologically

active is actually fundamental because if there's geological activity, then there's a chance of evolution. So this fascination with life and with the facts of nature and with the cosmos, all its many modes and possibilities and the contemplation that goes with it. This is the Carl Sagan paradigm. And this is what a lot of people who work at NASA today live by. It's the fascination. So these two are not really compatible. And you'll notice, by the way, that Bezos and Musk and all these space bros, they're not interested in science. They're interested in engineering, maybe, but they're

not interested in science for science's sake, because science doesn't make any money. It's a cost center. They're not fundamentally interested in knowing more. They're interested in sending people there, or at least that's what they proclaim. And the sending people there always makes me cringe, because for one, we've known for 60, 70 years now that the space probes and the remotely operated machines are so much better at doing science than people. So there's none of that desire for knowledge. There's a desire for a certain kind of progress. And it's interesting because these are the same people who at the same time are selling us automation and artificial intelligence with breathless predictions that humans are going to be replaced. And at the same time, the one place where humans

should not be replaced, but in fact have historically been replaced, in effect, is space. I would say it's an aporia in the discourse. It's a blind spot. But it points to something else. It points to a certain conception of humanity where it has to necessarily be heroic. And the proof of heroism is in the absurd domination of nature. So it's a bit like these folks who would, you know, assemble crews and arm ships to go find the North Pole, and they would all die horrible deaths eating each other. And it was absurd. And then they would ask the locals, like the Inuit, and they would ask them, you know, so where's the North Pole? And they would be like, yeah, sure, it's over there,

I can take you. But like, what's the point? There's nothing there. There's nothing there. So it's the romance of exploration for exploration's sake is kind of a strange thing, but it harkens back to something else, which is the so-called age of explorations. And the moment when Europe sent its boats to seek spices and to subjugate the people who lived there. You can even kind of see that in some of the kind of visions that are put forward by some of these people who are involved in this new space race, right? Talking about a new manifest destiny and things like that. But I think it's fascinating that you lay out or, you know, Doudny, I guess, in the book lays out these two different approaches,

these two different paradigms. And, you know, I think you can see both of them in like the conversations that are happening today, in the sense that there is still some discussion of these alternatives, of this Carl Sagan kind of paradigm. But Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and a lot of the kind of infrastructure that is being built around them, really have this kind of Von Braun approach, right? This kind of dominating space, controlling space, colonizing space. And that, unfortunately, really does seem to be getting the most attention right now. And it's also through machines, through the industry, the work, the unnatural, the artifices. This is what matters. It's the exertion of human ingenuity and ability to build.

And it's kind of interesting because here's a counter model. So when Captain Cook landed in Tahiti first and then went on to Australia and Australia and named all these places after, you know, English, whatever, the person who actually guided his way through this and navigated on his behalf was named Tupaya. And he was a great priest and kind of a scheming warrior of Tahiti. And he basically knew all the islands. He navigated only with the stars, so he did not need a compass. That's the tradition of Polynesian voyaging. You know all the stars, you know where they rise on the horizon, and you can basically chart a course with that. So that's for the science part. For the technical part, the Polynesians, they come from a civilization that had invented

the jib sail. So the sail that can help you sail against the wind, thousands of years before it came to Europe. So these people were very technologically adept. They had actually mastered the oceans in a way that Europeans even struggled to do, even with their compasses and their chronometers. And they had spread throughout the Pacific Ocean. And they would have regular contacts between islands that were seemingly impossible to reach if you don't have a map. But they had a map in their heads. It was part of their cultural treasure.

So these people were incredible scientists and technologists and engineers. And they didn't make a big deal about conquering other places, at least that we know because that's what survived. But they were not imperialists in the way Cook was. Because Cook came there and he said, oh, I want to study the transit of Venus, but the secret orders were, you know, claim the land on behalf of the king. And Joseph Banks, he wanted to find nutritious vegetables to transplant to the Caribbean so that they could feed the slaves. So that's empire. The Polynesians, not at all. The Polynesians, what they would do is they knew the stars, they knew how to navigate.

Tupaya even drew a map of all the society islands from memory. And they would take taro and banana and coconuts and they would find islands and they would plant them. And then they would live there and then they would travel between islands and have commerce and exchanges. It was very different, and their technology was not the center of the imagination. Whereas Europeans who came there, well, they had their big boats and their guns and their imperial dreams and their imperial science, and they explored, quote-unquote, which in fact was disubjugated. So that's the age of exploration we're referring to. 90% of the people who lived there, because it was actually inhabited,

were killed by germs. There was 150,000 to 200 people living on the Marquesas Islands, pre-contact, that's a low estimation. Post-contact, 200 years later, 8,662 at the last census. This is the age of exploration. It's genocide. It's essentially genocide, period. So using that as the sort of model and the prototype, enlightenment, progress, this is not progress. I'm sorry, this this is not at least in my opinion but then again i'm a nobody and i do not have control over resources in such a way that could make my narrative or the narrative of the others and the victims be the prevalent or predominant narrative i think that illustrates really well like the problem with kind of the

driving ideas behind, I guess, the ideology of this new kind of space race, this new attempt to have us colonize Mars, colonize the moon, build space colonies, if you're Jeff Bezos and these other ones, you know, what some of these companies want to do with the asteroid mining and things like that. Can you imagine, this is the imagination of shopkeepers. I'm sorry. It's like, we're going to go to space to build factories? I mean, what is this? It is sort of the transformation of Von Braun, you know, into sort of naked capitalism. The main characteristic of space is that it's empty. There's nothing there. There's nothing of value except knowledge, but knowledge of the kind that is not leveraged into tradable commodities. So you have to create that out of thin air or out of vacuum, actually.

And by the way, I must say, you know, I'm not at all clear that it was better before when, you know, NASA and the race to the moon inspired the nation and got everybody behind a collective effort, the pinnacle of American liberalism. I'm not so sure about that either, because I'm just not so sure about the 60s and the government in the 60s and the point of planting a flag on the moon. Everybody's like, oh, but, you know, so many things were invented. The economic benefits, like the trickling down of economic benefits from the space race, the foam mattress, Tang, like the computers they used even were already built because they had to use technology that was reliable because you don't fling people in these tin cans without, you know, reliable technology. So in fact, you know, this whole thing about it drove technological innovation.

Not really. It actually used things that were already there and that were reliable. There's this thing where when they build this probe, NASA, they do what they call a technological freeze, where at some point in the development and building of the spacecraft, they freeze. So they will not add any new features. And so, for instance, the two Voyagers were sent into space in 1977. The technological freeze was in 1972. So you usually use technology that's proven, ancient enough,

and hardened for the conditions of space, rather than go crazy in your lab and do crazy technological experiments. They're extremely cautious engineers, these people. They do very systematic, little by little improvements. This is not the giant leap of technological invention and quote-unquote innovation. This is not the field where you do that space. The Hubble, for instance, was in fact a spy satellite repurposed, you know, to just change the optics. There's probably 12 or 15 of these, you know, at any one time, like orbiting and, you know, taking pictures of probably the entrance of some cave in Iraq or something. Can you imagine if we lived in a rational world, what we could do with all these things pointing at the stars. The state's competition for space, which is originally an artifact of nuclear bombs and

ballistic missiles and the repurposing of ballistic missiles. So that competition in itself is extremely problematic. So I'm not sure that it was better before when it was a kind of national endeavor. You know, what you're saying there is just making me think that like the Silicon Valley model of constant iteration is probably not the best way for us to approach the development of the things that we send into space. So I think that's a really interesting point. And it also helps to kind of reorientate us a bit. And I wanted to kind of switch gears to think about kind of the inspirations going into these visions, right? Because, you know, Musk and Bezos are acting on certain ideas of what space should be

and what living in space should be. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that some of those visions are inspired by science fiction that they have consumed over the course of their lives, right? A certain kind of science fiction. Yeah. Obviously, they're not heavy readers of Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler. No, absolutely. And so naturally, you have written a book that is about Star Trek, the economics of Star Trek. And I'm happy to have you comment on Star Trek. But I guess, are there any specific kind of aspects of science fiction that stand out to you when you look at the visions being put forward by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and kind of

the space visions that they think we should be pursuing? I mean, what I find very interesting in science fiction as a sort of corpus of works and as a corpus of texts is for the literary genre that prefers to talk about the future, except for a few, it's incredibly familiar. Science fiction as a whole, I'm not talking about the marginal figures who are not recognized for their groundbreaking work, but usually the kind of pulpy science fiction that we get is incredibly dystopian. And the usual canvas or the usual narrative articulation is essentially a Gothic novel. And when you think about it, the Gothic novel, so Frankenstein, was born in the early 19th century, and a lot of it was trying to work through the impact of mechanization and the impact of capitalism on

the world. So science fiction is really that, like the kind of like mainstream science fiction that you see in movies and all that stuff. It's very fetishistic about objects and about machines, and also about a sort of eternal human nature. You know, somehow, even in the midst of these machines, humans are still humans, and they want to get it on, and they want to dominate, and they want to beat the bad guys. And so, you know, it's enmeshed in that sort of pablum of melodrama that is the usual spectacle we get sold. And science fiction, you know, as a genre, it's kind of the ideological adjunct to these latter-day captains of industry.

Not Octavia Butler, obviously, but Robert Heinlein or Philip Dick. So this is kind of an interesting thing because science fiction always from its origin, and I would say, you know, like it's what do they call the golden age and Asimov and all these people in the late 30s. They're, you know, lower middle class Americans who want to invent a way in between communism and capitalism. And so they're essentially technocratic. And the enterprise of science fiction is in a way to train people into accepting technocracy and the sort of management by knowledge

and by optimization, management of society by knowledge and optimization. So trust me, I know what I'm doing. I'm an engineer. You know, in Asimov, it's always the engineer or the guy with the highest diploma who wins the day. It's usually a man also. And Asimov is rather innocuous compared to somebody like Heinlein, who was a straight up fascist. It's the sort of stuff that trickled down again to, you know, kids in the 40s and 50s. And that was not, you know, sort of a pornographic comics. I'm sure the kids would have preferred Wonder Woman and, you know, the bondage stuff. But the code, I think there was this moment when the government prevented comics from publishing stuff that was a little too risque. So they went to science fiction and, you know, like the monsters of Mars and that kind of

stuff. It's very juvenile. It's not very sophisticated. It's what they call popular culture, but it's not popular because it's made by big corporations. And is it culture? Yes, because in a way it mobilizes your attention and your brain, but it's not Rousseau. Again, I'm going to sound like an asshole, sorry, but yes, there is such a thing as high culture and there is such a thing as not high culture. And high culture is high culture because it's worth it and reaches the mind in ways that entertainment doesn't. You know, I think that's part of a larger conversation that's playing out right now. You know, when you look at the Disney films and stuff like that. I mean, the tie up between these space bros and the spectacle industry is fundamental.

Like Elon Musk is in Marvel movies, like he makes cameos. I know people around town here, like they all get all wet when they get invited to a junket at SpaceX. They're like, oh, he's building Star Trek, you know, it's like, no, he isn't. I completely agree. That's a great point. And it brings me to something else that I wanted to discuss with you. So, Manu, obviously, you've written this book about Star Trek. You know, it was a few years ago now. But when I read through it, there was something that really stood out to me when I was thinking about kind of the ideologies that were presented about what life in space will look like. I think

there's this idea that because we have these advanced technologies, that we will progress as a species. And I think that one of the things, one of the important messages of your book is that it's not the technology that makes the social relations and the economic relations advance. It's actually us changing those relations that can give way to a better society. It's the example of the replicator, right? Star Trek is very smart for that because you have the Federation that has the replicator and makes it a public good, you know, and so everybody can access the services of the replicator for free and everything is free as a result.

And then you have the Ferengi, so the space traders slash capitalists, you know, they're funny. And they use the replicator to churn out coffee and food in their restaurants and gambling establishments, and they make money off of it. The technology is the same. The social outcome and the social purpose is completely different. You know, there's a parting line in the world between those who think that technology, in fact, is a product of culture and social relations and those who think that social relations

are determined by technology. I'm of the first kind. I think that we only look for solutions to the problems or the questions we ask ourselves. And that's obvious. The steam engine was invented by Hero of Alexandria in the first century. It's a famous example. But, you know, the only use he could find for it was as a prop for theater because there

was no need for a steam engine in the Roman Empire because mostly there was slavery. Multiplying the labor of humans was just not a valuable thing. So that's what I mean by social relations determine the use of technology. And quote unquote, innovation is just that. It's just finding discrete solutions to problems that have incentive structures. There's nothing special about it. It's mechanistic. Transforming social relations, now that's more complicated. And to be fair to Star Trek, it's probably the only mainstream popular culture body of

work, at least until recently, that sort of took on the task of describing a society where social relations have been transformed. You know that quip from Frederick Jameson that, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And it is, because we think we have a lot of imagination, but in fact, we don't. I agree. And I think one example that really shows that is obviously you have Star Trek and the Federation with this kind of different form of social organization without scarcity, right? But then on the other hand, you have Ursula K. Le Guin, who's writing in The Dispossessed about Anaris, this anarchist society, which has a lot of scarcity, but also organizes

it among these kind of communalist relations, where they're not just going for profit and things like that. And I think that illustrates how, you know, these social relations can exist, whether it's scarcity or not. And it's not the technology that determines that the possibility of those things. Now, you think, you know, Ursula Le Guin is the person who did the real effort here, instead of resorting to the magical technology of the replicator, the real hard work of imagination. It's all Arsalan Aguin's. I'm currently trying to write this utopian novel, and it's very hard. I didn't think it was going

to be that hard, but it's very hard because we are set in our ways and we are tied to our present and to our social lives and the way we relate to each other. So it takes, I would say drugs, but it takes some kind of mind-altering exercise to get to the point where you can imagine social relations that are different. Obviously, these fantasies of space colonizations are not it. I understand they serve a purpose, an affirming purpose for the fans, because there's a fandom around it. And they sort of give a purpose and inspiration to people who would otherwise be alienated, who are alienated, because we all are alienated.

And I understand there's an element of escapism in this. And you can see it in the virulence and the vitriol they fling at you, you know, even on Twitter when you make a joke about space Karen. I mean, I got in real trouble for that. I understand our lives are empty and alienated, especially in time of pandemic. So escapism is the opium of the people. Opium is not bad. Opium was the only way at the time to dull the pain. I don't want to sound like, again, I sound like an asshole, but the real adult thing to do here is to face your deepest fears and to face the pain. Escapism and space fantasies

are not it. I'm sorry. They're more of the same. They're technologically determined and they come out of, you know, there's going to be a space economy and we're going to make tons of money mining asteroids. This is perpetuating whatever doesn't work on Earth and spilling it into space. Because the dark side of this is the following. When you live in space, when you're like on that space station thing, or if you're in a capsule, or if you're on Mars, when you live in space, you're entirely at the mercy of life support systems. Your entire survival depends on manufactured artificial

technologies. You have relinquished your most basic freedom, which is to breathe without the intermediary of a machine. So this is an interesting thing that, in fact, they're talking about, oh, the freedom to explore and all that. But in fact, they're talking about, oh, the freedom to explore and all that. But in fact, when you go to space, when you go to Mars, you are relinquishing one of your most fundamental, probably the most fundamental freedom, which is to avail oneself of the common good that is Earth's atmosphere. So it's the opposite of freedom.

Part of it is about, you know, building rockets to go to Mars because it's cool. But the other part of this is to train people and to discipline them through discourse into this notion that your life is entirely tethered to technological artifacts. It's to train people to live under extreme conditions with the life support systems of technological artifacts and to do that on Earth, which when you think about it, Earth provides us with that freedom. It doesn't just nurture life. We're more than just life.

We're not microbial mat. We have brains. We have consciousness, the light of consciousness. Yes. And Earth provides us with the freedom to explore that consciousness because we can breathe and we can, you know, very basic things. You relinquish that if you go to live on Mars. You become an appendage of the machine, of big machines and big systems. And yes, they're very impressive, these life support systems that

allow people on the International Space Station to, you know, breathe their recycled oxygen. Yes, they're very impressive, but they're the opposite of freedom. They're the opposite of what being a human on a fundamental level is about. It really does seem like it's this kind of technological utopianism really kind of taken to an extreme, right? This kind of belief in technology being able to control everything and being what gives us the means of survival, right? That's the important part, because the problem with the atmosphere is that nobody owns it, or we all own it collectively. It's a common good. It's a public good. It's very hard to turn it into a marketable commodity. It's a problem.

It's kind of the limit of the market and everything ideology. And so the idea that you have colonies of people under domes or in tunnels on Mars, and basically they have to pay for their oxygen. This is Verhoeven in Total Recall. He was making fun of that in 1990. But essentially, this is what it is. If you live in space, you're at the mercy of technology, and somebody owns that technology and therefore owns you. I call that technological supremacy, And that's the dream. It's a dream of control. It's a dream of subjugation. It's the boot of capitalism stomping on the face of humanity forever. That's what it is.

And that's very dark. Bezos is less vocal about it. He just wants to build factories in space, you know. Elon Musk, he's got this public persona where he makes all these grandiose statements and, you know, and he turns it into some sort of a cult. I mean, he's a little bit like, you know, Dr. Oz for incels. It's not helping.

And again, we have no, I mean, we can yell, we can make podcasts, we can write books every once in a while, but in the end, these are decisions that are beyond our control, because if you have the kind of resources Elon Musk has, you have more power. And that's a democratic problem. I think that's a great point.

I think in the piece about Doudna's book, it talked about the need for a deceleration in the space race to focus on what's happening on Earth. And I think that's very much what you're talking about. And so I think that's a really important thing to kind of be focused on. Because I think after, you know, a century of really intense, like industrial revolution and capitalism, the life systems of Earth are shattered, are in trouble, right? And they need to be restored before we think about shooting off into space somewhere. And our life support system on Earth is much more subtle. And it's a bunch of intertwined chemical cycles of exchange between the living and the mineral.

These are things that, look, we barely know what's at the bottom of the ocean. A recent paper just highlighted the fact that whales had a way to communicate amongst each other to warn of whalerships attacks in the 19th century. So there are other cultures that are not human on this planet. We don't owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our children and grandchildren. And not just that, we owe it to the people who, you know, it's a trendy term to say the global South, but the truth is the people who are going to suffer the most of the disaster we're bringing on to Earth with climate change are the same who first were colonized and besmirched and subjugated by Europeans. They are the ones who are going to be the victims again.

Jakarta is drowning in water. And Jakarta is, you know, like Indonesia is a developed country, but you know, like this is not, Bangladesh is going to be a horror show. Kim Stanley Robinson in his latest novel, The Ministry of the Future, you know, he talks about wet bulb episodes where it gets too hot for people and people die. And that's something that is happening already on a small scale right now. It's happening in the equinoctial band. It's not happening in the North. So that's why we owe it to the world to right the wrongs. That's what we owe to the species. It's not we owe to the species.

It's not spreading into space. And we cannot do both, by the way. Like people are like, oh yeah, but look, Elon is building cars. That's not how it works. To sort of tie it all up. The problem when you're going to make statements such as, I want our species to be multi-planetary and, you know, extend the light of consciousness. So these big philosophical millenarian statements. If you're serious, then I think this would deserve more consideration and debate, for one. This is accepted as an article of faith. So I think this should be

subjected to democratic control. If this is so serious and so important, then it should not be left to the whim of individuals who essentially won the lottery of capitalism. Besides all the other aspects of it that I find both ungenerous and unsophisticated and problematic in their own way, I think that fundamentally, if this is so important, then it deserves deliberation and collective deliberation. And that is not in the cards because these are people who just say, I've got my billions and I'm just going to shoot them into space to save the species. And I hope you'll thank me for this. It's conceited and it's also incredibly dreadful. We have serious problems down here that we need to address.

And instead of talking about terraforming Mars, perhaps try to make Earth habitable for everybody. You know, start with that. And then, you know, we can discuss jaunts or adventures beyond the atmosphere. But first, let's take care of the atmosphere. And, you know, I sound like such a downer and I sound like we're the cantankerous leftists

who are like, this is all screwed. But we're trying to speak for culture. And I know it's not popular and I know it doesn't sell books and I know it doesn't provide influence in any sort. But I feel we have to do it so that, you know, later people will dig into the archives and they will see that not everybody agreed with what happened. So we're doing this for the light of consciousness. Yeah, clearly there is an existential threat right now. And it's not

whether or not we should be colonizing Mars. It's the climate crisis that we face right now. And we still need to be undertaking these kinds of scientific missions to learn more about the cosmos and to learn more about outer space. But in terms of where we're living, you know, we need to be paid attention on repairing the damage that we've already done to planet Earth, I think, before we look at heading out and colonizing other planets or moons. And I think you've given us a really sobering perspective on, you know, space and these grand space visions. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and chat, Manu. It's been great. Live long and prosper, my friend. Live long and prosper.

Manu Sadia is the author of Treconomics, the Economics of Star Trek. You can find information on where to get it in the show notes. You can find Manu on Twitter at at Treconomics. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can find the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus. Thanks for listening. Thank you.