Tech Won't Save Us - Who Inspired Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ Space Visions? w/ Fred Scharmen

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Fred Scharmen to discuss Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ visions for space colonization, the inspiration they draw from the work of Wernher von Braun and Gerard O’Neill, and what’s wrong with basing our future on those ideas.Fred Scharmen is the author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. He teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning and is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems. Follow Fred on Twitter at @sevensixfive.🚨 T-shirts are now available!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:Paris wrote about the billionaire space race and Jeff Bezos’ vision for space colonization.Wernher von Braun was a Nazi before becoming chief architect of NASA’s Saturn V rocket. He appeared in a 1955 Disney program about space flight, but his past was also criticized, including in a song by Tom Lehrer.Elon Musk has cited Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” as an inspiration and Jeff Bezos saved The Expanse when it was cancelled.Jeff Bezos’ ideas about space colonization come directly from Gerard O’Neill’s vision of space colonies floating in space.Adam Mann asked in the New Yorker whether Mars was really ours for the taking.The Just Space Alliance presents an alternative to the billionaire framing of space.Support the show

We have about seven or eight billion people right now. If we simply apply a multiplier to get our society of a trillion in the solar system, sure, we get a thousand Mozarts or a thousand Einsteins. We also get millions of people dying of starvation, like every hour. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Fred Sharman. Fred is the author of Space Forces, a critical history of life in outer space.

He also teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning, and he is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems. In this week's episode, Fred and I talk about his book, and he is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems. In this week's episode, Fred and I talk about his book, and in particular, how, you know, visions of space habitation and colonization from the past inspire the ideas that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and people like that espouse today. And in particular, how understanding those histories can give us more insight into where these ideas come from, the politics that are embedded within them, and how they evolved to the point that they

are today. And, you know, in particular, why we should be concerned that these are the ideas that are kind of seizing the public imagination about what the human relationship to outer space should look like. In particular, we focus on how the visions of Wernher von Braun and Gerard O'Neill inspire the ideas of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They have two very different ideas of what that should look like, and they also kind of come from different backgrounds. They're very different things kind of inspiring their ideas and their orientation toward how humans should kind of undertake this colonization and this habitation of the space beyond planet Earth. We also dip into science fiction, these narratives around colonization, and also kind of what that tells

us about ideas about world building, world making, and how understanding these histories should also force us to kind of reflect on the systems and ideas that govern how we are making and remaking Earth as well. So that's just to say, you know, I had a really great time chatting with Fred. I think this is a fascinating conversation. And I think if you have any interest in, you know, what these billionaires are doing in space, even if that is a critical interest, or especially if that is a critical interest, then I think that you will really like this conversation too. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada,

and you can find out more about the other shows in the network by going to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would find it interesting or would learn from it. And this episode, like every episode, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. This has been a fantastic year for the podcast. You know, I've spoken to so many incredible people. The listenership of the show has grown not only in numbers, but also increasingly internationally, you know, getting more people from around the world listening to the show, which is always something that is important to me.

And I also launched a weekly newsletter that's free for everybody. And in the new year, the new website will finally be launching as well. So if you like Tech Won't Save Us, if you appreciate the work that I put into making it every single week, and you enjoy and learn from these conversations, I would ask you to please consider becoming a supporter. You know, maybe you've been considering it and meaning to do it for a while, and I would just ask you to pause the show right now, go over to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus

where you can become a supporter, get access to the show's Discord server, get stickers, and by doing so, you can help ensure that I can keep doing this now into next year and beyond. Because I think if you look at the top tech podcasts that you'd see on Apple Podcasts and other podcast apps, you can see that it's full of crypto stuff, VC stuff, you know, your regular kind of booster-ish tech podcasts. And I think Tech Won't Save Us provides a really essential pushback to those kind of views and those podcasts, and I hope that you would agree. So you can join supporters like Michaela from Philadelphia and Meg

from LA by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter to support the work that I put into making the show every single week. And I, of course, appreciate that so much, because without that support, I just couldn't keep making the show. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Fred, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me, Paris. I am really excited to speak with you. You know, you have this fantastic new book, Space Forces, that really gives us a critical history of these ideas of outer space, especially at a moment when, you know, some of the most powerful people in the world are trying to convince us that our future, you know, lies beyond the planet Earth. And so I think it's a really important conversation

to have. And I think that your book gives us a great entry into it. And so there's so many things that I want to pull out, we won't get to them all. But I think that it's good to get started with a brief idea of the visions of, you know, space habitation and colonization, I guess, that are offered by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, just to give us that kind of foundation as we get into this kind of deeper conversation to look at the roots and kind of the implications of these visions. Yeah, I think, you know, we're all familiar with Musk and Bezos from these like ongoing daily news stories, especially this year about the successes or failures even of their respective rocket companies, but also by way of their history as tech founders, tech investors, and people who have been really deeply involved with all aspects of daily life,

from eBay to Amazon.com to Tesla to SolarCity and to Whole Foods and the Washington Post, the companies that they own and have bought and have sort of founded, but sort of not sometimes, you know, kind of intersect with almost everything we do. And so I don't think that it's a sort of side project of theirs to want to go to space and create new worlds, because that sort of all encompassing nature of the package of services that they aim to provide on Earth, I think speaks to their bigger term plans about going out into space. And that those are really bigger term plans. Those are those are plans that stretch into the 10, 30, 40, 150,000 year kind of time spans. And it's easy to forget that when we're watching, you know,

the launches, which are cool and the landings, which are cooler. And some of the trips, you know, bring celebrities. And we have this sort of, you know, we can be fans or not of their progress. And of course it's fun to watch, you know, their banter on Twitter and things like that. And the way, you know, they can start conversations or jokes, and we can make fun of them too. But I think it's important to remember, along with all that, that these two people are

true believers, that they have these big projects. And their big projects are, on the surface, I think, you know, really similar. But when you start to scratch that surface and dig into the superstructures, there's a lot of different things going on. Just, you know, to give a quick gloss about what those projects are, Elon Musk wants to create a second Earth, a kind of backup planet in case something goes, you know, terribly wrong here on our planet. And, you know, he has, you he has a kind of running litany of things that could go wrong. We could get hit by an asteroid. We could have technology run out of control. Gee, imagine that. We could have a pandemic, a global pandemic. Imagine that. We could start a nuclear war, which is an old apocalypse that gets reh, too. And it's still kind of out there in new space race narratives about China all of a sudden.

So in order to, you know, as he put it in a tweet just the other week, preserve the light of consciousness. He says that humanity needs to establish a presence in outer space and specifically on Mars. So that's been Elon's goal for decades now. His original focus was to sort of jumpstart an interest in NASA in the public space program by creating this image of a plant growing on Mars that would be broadcast back to Earth, like a completely uncrewed robotic mission that would simply land this greenhouse and film and broadcast the progress of new life on a, you know, probably, if we're being honest, lifeless planet. So when he found out that,

okay, how do I do that? How do I need to get a rocket? Okay, so how do I get a rocket? I need to find someone who will sell me a rocket. Well, no one will sell me a rocket. So let's just start from scratch and build a rocket. So I need to make a rocket company. So I need customers. He's interested in creating huge cities in space that are completely free floating. So not on the surface of the moon, not on Mars, not on any other planetary body, but just in orbit around the earth or in free orbits around the sun. And his rhetoric, and I think to a large extent, like his core sort of set of beliefs about how and why we should do that is to just expand human culture. So not as a kind of hedge against something going wrong, but as a chance to, you know,

in the language he uses, expand outward into space and bring all that we do that is the best of us with us. So he talks about a future human population in the trillions living in space. And what that would bring along, he says, is something like 1000 Mozarts or 1000 Einsteins. So it really is a kind of a vision about like, not recovering or rebuilding from the end of the world, but just expanding the world as it is indefinitely out into the solar system. Yeah, you know, I think that gives us a really great kind of summation of these ideas. And there are a couple things that you said in there that really stand out to me, right? You said that these are visions that are, you know, hundreds of years, even 1000 years into

the future. But it's interesting, because at the same time, these billionaires tend to make arguments that, you know, what they are doing is also about addressing problems today. Like, you know, we see Jeff Bezos, in particular, saying that, you know, what they are doing is also about addressing problems today. Like, you know, we see Jeff Bezos in particular saying that, you know, we should be moving industrial production into space to get rid of the pollution as though that's some sort of solution to like climate change and the problems that we're dealing with today, even though the timelines don't match up at all. You know, the timeline for something like that to happen, if it ever happens, is like probably hundreds or thousands of years or something, right?

Whereas we need to deal with climate change in the coming decades. And so you kind of see this kind of breakage, even though these visions are sold to us as something that we need now that are addressing problems, the reality is that it's not so clear that that's the case. Yeah, I mean, there are arguments at different scale that are deployed, I think, for different audiences. And the use of a big project to solve immediate problems is one that I think does get a lot of current headlines.

If somebody says we're going to build cities and space for millions and eventually trillions of people in the year 3000, OK, great, next. But if we say we're going to move all industrial production off of the planet, and the other side of that coin is zone earth for light industrial, which is like art studios and stuff, which we're familiar with here in Baltimore, residential, and in some versions of this scenario, a national park. But the timelines don't make sense. And just the simple kind of the logic of, you know, what Bezos should know best logistics don't really quite make sense either.

Like, are we going to order an iPhone and have it delivered from orbit? And that's not such a strange or glib ask, because, you know, in the simple production of something like an iPhone into the heavy and rare earth metals that are necessary for the complicated electronics that feed the object itself, but also the whole network, you know, almost invisible infrastructure that surrounds it are some of the most toxic processes that are happening, you know, today. And they're feeding that logic of the sort of buy now one click, you know, logistics that we rely on. We rely on getting our orders from Apple and Amazon in this really

timely manner. So, I mean, Bezos should know it's not going to, you know, come in a reentry capsule to my front porch, you know, in a day. So the vision drives so many kinds of disingenuous, I think, smaller arguments at every scale. And some of those are directed at public audiences. Some of those are directed at potential constituents and even potential customers to get buy-in. Some of those are directed at investors because that's an important part of the business model too. These are eventually going to be, or in theory, plan to be companies that turn a profit. And I don't think either SpaceX or Blue Origin yet does, you know, turn a profit. They're heavily reliant on their own sort of visionary billionaire founders to

keep them afloat and keep them in research and development money. And the vision also depends on sort of appealing to governments and institutions to maintain all of that, right? I mean, because the biggest customer for SpaceX, at least, right now is still NASA. So that kind of public money and that kind of institutional connection to ideas about the public good is necessary in two ways, just from a practical standpoint to kind of maintain the relationships that sustain and build the company from that sort of visionary standpoint. But those end up being sort of all kinds of different publics, depending on what the immediate needs and what the immediate message is. Yeah, you know, it makes a ton of sense. And there's another piece of what you said that I want to get back to. And that is notably that

Jeff Bezos says that, you know, we should go out into space and bring the best of us with us, right? And the question naturally is, what does he imagine the best of us being? And then what happens to the worst of us is, you know, is the idea that that is just naturally left behind as we become this space-faring species? Or does that get, you know, conveniently ignored because it doesn't fit the narrative that he's trying to build for us? Or is it a sort of trickle-down logic that says a thousand Mozarts will be, you know, a net good that will uplift everyone's sort of heart and soul and, you know, scarcity in some kind of way just by making us better people? Because again, you know, the problem is not the production of culture or the production of food or the production of transportation.

The problem is access to those things, which, again, you know, Amazon is essentially a logistics company. So Bezos should understand the logic behind, you know, where there is lack and how like systems can be reorganized to provide for lack. I mean, and from another perspective, humanity could have had thousands of Mozarts and Einsteins, but probably they died of hunger in countries where people are very poor. So if the goal is to produce more Mozarts and Einsteins, we could rearrange the logistics network to make that happen today. And I think that's another in a sort of series of alibis, just to go to space, because going to space is like, is cool. And it's interesting. It's exciting. And it's hard to justify on its own terms. I don't think any sort of business venture that's yet invested in space, including Blue Origin and SpaceX, I don't think anybody's really made any

money in space yet. Well, probably communication satellites have been a profitable venture for a lot of people. That turns out to be, you know, the thing that SpaceX is relying on heavily today to build these vast networks of constellations of new high speed sort of direct point to point internet satellites. It's presented as a kind of humanitarian effort to connect people in remote places in the global south to information. But that tends to be, you know, often a gloss for this is expected to be a profit turning company. Starlink is going to make a profit, unlike SpaceX in the immediate term. Broadly, Starlink is going to make money doing this. They're not providing broadband, satellite, internet out of the goodness of their hearts. Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure what we'll notice a few years down the line is that the promises

of helping the global South were more of a PR move than, you know, actually what is going on here with the business side of Starlink. But I think that gives us a good way to turn and to think more deeply about these visions that, you know, these two billionaires in particular are putting out there. And I think it's best probably to go at them one at a time. And so I wonder, you know, I'll start with a broad question before I ask more specifics from, you know, the histories that you've laid out. But if we're thinking about the kind of vision of a future of space habitation that Elon Musk puts out there, you know, what are the things that we can draw from the history of this kind of space thinking that inspire the vision that he is putting forward?

So the book takes a look at sort of seven stories from, you know, what I think of as a 150 year period where people were really taking seriously this idea that humans can and should go and live in space forever, in theory. And if you're talking about Elon Musk, he's really drawing inspiration from what was called after the space race, but we can really sort of see was the sort of dominant model for at least the American side of the space race during the Cold War. What space historians often call the Von Braun paradigm. And this is, of course, a reference to Werner Von Braun, really the kind of foundational person in the American space program. He was literally the chief designer of the Saturn V rocket that landed Americans on the moon in 1969.

And von Braun is a really interesting figure, a really complicated figure in a lot of ways when you dig into his history. He was a card-carrying Nazi. He worked for Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in the war machine of Nazi Germany during World War II. His specific sort of task was to develop what would become the Nazi terror weapon, but also the first human-made object to reach space, the V2 missile. And von Braun had been working as an amateur in rocketry before the beginning of World War II, but was really sort of quickly absorbed into the German army apparatus and put to use first in research and development. But once the product was viable, it was then transferred into the sort of, you know, the own sort of vast logistics

empire of Nazi Germany. And it was mass produced by slave labor in a hollow mountain at Middle Baldoro concentration camp. The V2 is a really fascinating weapon because more people died making it than died at its point of impact in London and Rotterdam and other places that were the targets of the missile itself. Wow, I didn't realize that. Yeah, about 20,000 people died. They were worked to death, mass producing the V2. And this is a German company, you know, took over production. This wasn't something like that Wernher von Braun would have had direct oversight over. But he was on record visiting the camp several times. And not only was he a member of the Nazi Party, he was also a highly placed officer in the SS. And this participation or this fraught history of von Braun's is usually glossed over. And in fact, when he came over, it was literally glossed over as the American space program and American sort of big science and industry was absorbing former Nazi scientists. There was a literal American army program called Operation Paperclip

that would sort of clip in new aspects of the identities of these scientists and unclip, you know, the inconvenient papers and leave them behind. And so that was a sort of a literal kind of active editing, you know, in their own personal histories. But today, you know, I think everybody knows, or a lot of people in space science, at least, or who know a little bit about space history know that von Braun was a member of the Nazi party. But what I found in the stories that I started to dig up, particularly in Michael Neufeld's recent biography of von Braun, was that the stories we tell ourselves today about how that's OK, that von Braun was maybe just a pragmatist, that he was working in the service of freedom and he absorbed American values and he went on the Walt Disney show and he became sort of this American pop culture icon. Those stories still leave a lot on the table. Some of the documents that Neufeld unearthed talk about how von Braun, even in the late 1940s, when he was meeting with American figures in the military, he was presenting the need for

an American space station in those same terms, in terms of the need for military superiority, particularly military superiority over the Soviets. So he was advocating on behalf of a space station that would be a platform for nuclear bombs. And the logic that drives the need for that platform is the same logic of the V2, which is that it would serve as a terror weapon, essentially. That in warfare, no enemy country or no enemy combatant or no enemy civilian would know when to expect it or be able to prepare for the bombardment from above in advance of its coming. So the V2 famously would arrive in London faster than the speed of its own sound. So you wouldn't hear it until the explosion happened. And they were so bad at aiming them, that explosion could

happen anywhere, right? So that fear that just gets soaked into daily life is the same motivator that von Braun wants to mobilize in the service of a long-term American space program. And von Braun, you know, again, he had his own sort of complicated big picture goals. Just to add to what you're saying there, one thing that I found really interesting, and you said earlier how, you know, these billionaires that are promoting these visions today say different things for different audiences, right? And one of the things that stood out to me in the book was how von Braun would also have a different pitch, whether it was for the public or, you know, the government or whoever else that he was talking to, right? He

had these very different things that he would tell people to get everyone on side with his vision that was ultimately motivated by this very, like, kind of militaristic idea of what space should be. Yeah, von Braun was really, really good at that trick of delivering sort of subtly different messages to different audiences about why they should get on board with this big picture project. So there was one message, you know, in the interviews and stories that he put together with Walt Disney. There's another message in the pages of Collier's magazine. And there too,

there's not the fear of nuclear apocalypse that is the undercurrent of the message is not too hard to find. When you return to the series of stories in Collier's from the 1950s called Man Will Conquer Space Soon. Conquer was certainly not a metaphor for von Braun, and it doesn't take too deep a reading to see that. And again, his bigger picture, though, was to go and create a city on Mars to bring, you know, in his science fiction novel, The Mars Project, he writes about an expedition that happens after an apocalyptic nuclear war, in which basically an American-led international coalition takes over the world. So his novel takes place after this kind of fear of nuclear bombardment from above has won World War III on behalf of the Americans and defeated Soviet Russia and a bunch

of other Asian nations that form a coalition and ally with them. And so their next major kind of large-scale military goal that's undertaken by what he literally calls the Space Force in this 1948 novel. Which I think we should say, like, just for listeners who aren't so clear, is the name of what Donald Trump, you know, made the fifth or sixth branch of the U.S. military in 2019. Yeah, the Space Force existed in science fiction for probably 100 years before it was hard written into the United States military. So it's another sort of point of transfer between these weird sort of deep cultural imaginations and, you know, actual fact of the applications of power in the real world, say. And so the Space Force goes to Mars, and they discover a civilization there.

And as often happens in especially 20th century science fiction imaginations about Mars, they find that Mars is a really old desert planet. Venus is really much warmer than Earth, and it's probably younger. And so there's jungles of dinosaurs. Mars is drying out, and there's this ancient, wise race of highly technically advanced people there. And so in science fiction, especially in the early 20th century, people go to Mars to sort of find out what the future of Earth is. And so that's what the Space Force does in von Braun's science fiction novel. They go and sort of meet the Martian power structure, and they have these philosophical conversations about what is the purpose of humanity and technology, and what is the purpose of life in the universe? And the wise old Martians tell von Braun's protagonists that every society must go through a period of war and slavery

to gain dominance over their planet and over the cosmos. And so this idea that apocalypse is bound up with the expansion of the light of consciousness, that fear of the end of the world was an essential component of the big project, was right there in the start in the von Braun paradigm. It's at the core of the von Braun paradigm, along with the logic of the terror weapon. And I think it's not hard to see the influence of the von Braun paradigm on Elon Musk's kind of grand project to go and build a city on Mars, even to the point where it's almost too ridiculous to mobilize critically. But in von Braun's novel that the wise old Martian leader that his protagonists meet on Mars is literally called the Elon, which is a biblical term. It's like a judge.

You know, and von Braun converted to evangelical Christianity when he came to the United States. So you know, he's sort of mobilizing this other register of references, right? But it's just too perfect. There are also hyperloops, there are vacuum tube trains on Mars, there are electric vehicles on Mars, and I think they're all solar powered too. And of course, at SpaceX, they have the Von Braun conference room in their headquarters, which is, you know, sort of central to where they're making their engineering decisions, but also, you know, where they're mobilizing this grand vision. And this is not to say that Elon Musk is a secret Nazi or that, you know, there is some kind of, you know, hidden

agenda to his space program. But it's to say that, you know, and one of the things that I think is interesting to look for generally are these connections between different ideas about what worlds are for and how and why we make futures for them, or indeed future worlds from scratch. And when the imagination about the way that future worlds are thought through and planned, when that worldview is bound up in fear of apocalypse and fear of war and slavery, or even the implication that those things are necessary, difficult steps on the way to a bigger goal. And I think there's a lot of conversations that we should have there about that in the open. Yeah, you know, I think it's an essential point. And

I would agree with you that as much as it might be a joke sometimes that I don't think Elon Musk is, you know, secretly a Nazi who is, you know, just trying to further along von Braun's project or something like that. But you can see how these ideas that were established with a particular kind of idea of the world and how the world works, then just kind of filter out into other kind of ideas for space that happened there and are picked up by people who, you know, maybe aren't thinking so much about the original politics that was behind it, or that went into it, but then kind of guides their ideas of how things should move forward, such as, you know, how Elon Musk is approaching and thinking about space. And, you know, I think you gave us a lot of really important details in describing, you know,

von Braun's future and his vision. One thing that also stood out to me, though, in describing that was how von Braun was both heading NASA, but at the same time, writing and engaging with science fiction, and these kind of fictional ideas and tellings of the world. And it makes me think as well about how Musk and Bezos and many of these billionaires also cite science fiction as an inspiration for what they're thinking. And in particular, as you're talking about von Braun's belief that things need to go through, you know, this period of like apocalypse or difficulty before arriving to some kind of higher formation or whatever we might say, you know, it made me think recently, you know, Foundation show was made for Apple. But

Elon Musk also cites that as another kind of inspiration for his thinking. And, you know, in that kind of world, it's like, you know, there's this mathematician or whatever, who's predicting this, like, really kind of like 1000s of year downfall of this empire, and that this is necessary to protect humanity down the line, like, we just need to wait all these years before helping humanity, and many people are going to suffer in the meantime. Like it seems to fit very closely with, you know, how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and many of these figures seem to talk about how they think about the future. Yeah, it's a good point of foundation. It's kind of like, yeah, we're really smart and we can't help. So we're just going to, we're just going to get out

of here. So we'll see you guys. It's a similar kind of logic to like Mars and going to sort of create a backup for society on Earth while just everything goes to hell at the center of empire here where we're all sitting. I hadn't thought through Foundation as a rehearsal of some of those same scenarios, but that's a really interesting thing to bring to the table. You know, of course, Jeff Bezos is also the person who saved The Expanse. Right when The Expanse was going to get canceled by the SyFy channel, I think, he stepped in and bought the whole franchise and took it to Amazon Prime. And, you know, there's an interesting reading of science fiction that goes on. And I think in their own origin stories, both Bezos and Musk are consciously presenting themselves as science fiction fans.

But there's a lack of self-criticism that gets folded into, I think, their reading of science fiction, in which a lot of these universes that they're reading, you know, and these franchises that they're saving or presenting, they'd be more likely to be the baddie than, you know, than any of the heroes, too, especially in The Expanse, but maybe in Foundation as well. Yeah, absolutely. What was his name in The Expanse? The billionaire who's kind of the villain in the earlier part of the series. When I was watching it, and especially when he saved it, I was like, but that's who Jeff Bezos is, not one of the good guys. I mean, the protomolecule in expanse, the sort of glowing blue goo that industry and capitalism wants to mobilize, that the military wants to weaponize, that everybody

wants to sort of get their hands on, is one of the best metaphors for Amazon that I've ever seen on television. Because if it gets on you, whether you are a computer or a machine or an organism, it just turns whatever you are into something that is useful for it. It absorbs everything and turns it to its own sort of larger project, the protomolecule does, which is exactly how Amazon.com operates. It absorbs everything from the delivery infrastructure to the robot company that runs the warehouse to the logic of the server farm that then can be, you know, then I can rent the server space to the CIA or to NASA.

So Amazon sort of absorbs everything it touches and it turns it to its own ends in the same way that good science fiction, you know, shows us the worst aspects of technology when turned to the uses of power. Yeah, you know, I think that's a fantastic comparison. It's not what I realized before, but yeah, I'll definitely be thinking about that further. And I'm sure the listeners will as well. If they haven't, you know, watched the series, they'll have to check it out. But, you know, we're talking about Jeff Bezos now. And Bezos is also someone who has inspirations from these ideas that came before, you know, and I guess,

less so from von Braun and more from Gerard O'Neill, who is, you know, someone who he even, I believe, like, had as a professor when he went to college. And so what was O'Neill's vision of how we should, you know, move into space and colonize space? And how does that influence how Jeff Bezos thinks about and approaches these ideas? Yeah, Gerardo O'Neill was a physicist who taught at Princeton. And in the 1970s, he was able to start to develop some ideas that he had while teaching there, teaching physics class, teaching engineering classes. One of the ways that he says he likes to he liked to approach teaching physics was to ask students at the end of the 1960 that he says he likes to approach teaching physics was to ask students at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s to kind of think about long-term big

projects that would benefit all of humanity. And this was a way that he could sort of make physics and engineering cool again at a time when in North America there was a big backlash against big science because it was so often tied to the war machine that was still chewing up Vietnam in wars that seemed to never end. And of course, also being turned against American students back home. So he wanted to sort of rejuvenate and rehabilitate the reputation that physics had for providing the good. So one of the sort of projects that he says came out of his class is to build these giant free-floating spinning cities in orbit for first thousands, but eventually millions and millions of people. And so he had his students sort of designing these things. He had them working out the engineering specs, what would be the tensile strength, you know, how much material

would we need and where we get that material? And that started to attract the attention of people in space science generally and people in the counterculture. But that's a bigger story, too. He got funding from NASA to run a summer study at NASA Ames, which is where we now call Silicon Valley, is at, to sort of flesh out this project further beyond physics and engineering. So they brought in planners, architects, artists, ecologists, sociologists to sort of think deeply about, you know, what this could be and what would be the time span, what would be the material reality, what would be the logistics, you know, behind all of this. And that got a lot of popular press. Starting in 1975, he published his own book about it. There were a couple of other books put out about it. He was on shows like 60 Minutes talking about it. He was

still working at Princeton and still teaching. And in the 1980s, I think, Jeff Bezos was able to encounter him, not as a direct student, as far as I've been able to tell, but as someone who was a member of the kind of the space settlement fan club on campus. And that would sort of make a point of going to as many of O'Neill's public lectures as possible. So there's really much, if there's a loose connection, you know, between von Braun and Elon Musk, there's a really direct connection between Jeff Bezos and Gerard O'Neill. And this goes back to Bezos reading science fiction novels at his uncle's ranch in Texas when he was growing up, where he probably encountered Gerard O'Neill's book. Because Bezos was writing about and giving speeches as a

valedictorian in high school about people living in space from a very early age. So Bezos' own kind of origin story, his own sort of self-mythology, isn't shy about mentioning this connection to Gerard O'Neill and to the legacy of the ideas that he consciously wants to develop now using the infrastructure of Blue Origin as a starting point. So Bezos wants to go and build these huge cities in space for thousands and eventually millions of people. That's Blue Origin's corporate motto or their kind of corporate vision statement is millions of people living and working in space. And the core idea that mobilized O'Neill, and I think that now mobilized Jeff Bezos, is that planets really are a distraction at worst, and at best, a source of raw material and resources that are better put towards making these new worlds from scratch, towards the

construction of new ground, specifiable in every detail, without a history and without the kind of contingencies that come along with pre-existing cultures and worlds. We can make the world to order. We can deliver every aspect of it to you in a custom way, just like you'd specify the pair of pants and the color and size you want on amazon.com. And again, the project has its own logic that it turns everything towards. It sees something like the moon. It doesn't see a place to build a moon base. It sees a potential open pit mine that could be a source for material that could be processed and shot into orbit and reassembled into these new worlds built from scratch. So I think there's a connection there to, again, the logic that Gerard O'Neill was sort of building his case for these new worlds out of back in the mid-1970s.

And the kind of contemporary strategies that we see at work at every level in Jeff Bezos' companies. So not just Amazon.com, but of course, Bezos also owns a newspaper, also owns a grocery store chain. These are the components of worlds, right? This is a sort of gathering together of all the things that a world will need at every level of the supply chain. Again, you know, thinking in terms of logistics for the mobilization of all the pieces of a world or many potential worlds. He's using these as places to sort of work out the kinks and figure out how best to do everything that a world needs to do in order to make these new worlds in the future. You know, I think that's a really fascinating description, right? And to see this direct

connection to O'Neill, whereas, you know, well, I guess we're not really making assumptions with Musk and Von Braun when he literally has a conference room named after him. And you can see the connections there but but still it's it's much more direct in the case of bezos and he's very clear about like this being the real inspiration behind what he's thinking and one thing that stood out to me about o'neill's vision is also the link to the counterculture o'neill's relationship with stewart brand and you know naturally the counterculture is something that looms really large in the history of Silicon Valley itself, as this kind of inspiration for a particular ideology that started to grow and, you know, later fused with neoliberalism through the through the 80s and stuff like that. And so I found that a really interesting connection there,

especially as you say, you know, there were protests against big science that O'Neill was pushing back on. And I think that, you know, protests against, you know, the kind of relationship between science and the military is something that is typically associated with the counterculture as well. So can you talk a little bit about that relationship to the counterculture and these ideas? Yeah, I mean, even before he was funded by NASA, Gerard O'Neill was funded by Stuart Brand's Point Foundation, which is an institution that Brand created to use the profits from the Whole Earth Catalog in order to promote social good. You know, as Brand saw it, in order to advance, you know, a particular kind of agenda and keep ideas in the broader cultural conversation. And these were ideas about frontiers, really. You know, Stuart Brand is and has been and still is, I think, heavily invested in the assumption that cultures need an outside or an edge in order to flourish and thrive.

And so that was Brand's approach to counterculture, I think, is that, you know, counterculture is where that new production of new ideas happens. And it was its own kind of frontier. And so brand wanted to support that frontier in the whole earth catalog in the in the 1960s and into the 1970s. And when the whole earth catalog turned out to be a tremendously profitable sort of venture, not unlike amazon.com, I'm now thinking, you know, as an early example of Amazon, one of Bezos's first impulses about Amazon was to make it the everything store, right? So not too far away from the impulses behind a whole earth catalog. So Brand, you know, was taking the profits from one kind of frontier and investing them in what he saw as another frontier, you know, what Gerard

O'Neill literally called in his book of 1977, the high frontier. And I think they had ideas about the utility of counterculture that were very much in alignment, Stuart Brand and Gerard O'Neill, that counterculture was useful for a kind of research and development laboratory for society. And that ideas generated by countercultures at the edges or fringes of cultures or of empires, again, could be incorporated or absorbed back to the center, and we would all be made better for it, you know, in some way. So there's a kind of like counterculture as paradoxically site of capitalist production, or site of capitalist sort of research that I think we can use to draw a line from Stuart Brand through Gerard O'Neill

to Jeff Bezos, because, you know because I don't think Bezos would be interested in a critique of Amazon by way of The Expanse, as long as you're watching The Expanse on Amazon. So that critique is just absorbed back into the bigger machine or bigger world, or bigger empire, if you like, already anyway. And this is cognate with what Gerard O'Neill was saying about the potential for the production of these new worlds, that they would also end cultural conflict between cultures, that we could make, in the words of Isaac Asimov, who was on a television interview with Gerard O'Neill in the 1970s, that we could make a Palestine in space, an Israel in space, a Northern Ireland in space,

you know, and an Irish Republican space. So that if everybody had their own world, there would be no more conflict over territory or over ideology. And that this would be a sort of utopian side effect of the ability to produce worlds from scratch. You could produce worlds for everybody, and they would all be still part of the bigger project and places where, okay, if something works, we can, you know, now monetize it. And so that that totalizing logic that sees counterculture as like, oh, yeah, they don't like us, but we can, we can make some use of that, you know, that that absorbs critique, you know, seamlessly, and sells it back to you is, I think, present as a through

line there, too. I think it's such a great point. And, you is, I think, present as a through line there, too. I think it's such a great point. And, you know, especially when you look at the role that counterculture served, especially to the tech industry, like, you know, you can very much see what you're saying in that. You know, I think as you're talking about frontiers, especially in relation to Stuart Brand, you know, I think it naturally brings to mind that a lot of these visions for space have some kind of roots and thinking along the lines of colonization. And it's often framed in this way, right, that we're going to go out and colonize the stars, take over the stars, sometimes very explicitly in some of these thinkers work. And sometimes, you know, I guess it's a little bit less obvious, but it's still there. I think it's fair to say you also write that this kind of thinking about colonization or space, you know, exploration through the lens of colonization also leads to a natural kind of militarization of what ends up happening and the approach to space. So can you

talk a little bit about that relationship to colonization in these space discourses? I'm certainly grateful to a sort of long roster of people who are maintaining an ongoing conversation in popular culture about this thread of colonial language in space science, about the dangers of talking about things as a frontier, the dangers of using language about conquest and the mindset that's bound up in that word space colony. And I think those critiques, you know, again, that so many people are kind of bringing to bear are way too easily dismissed by people who have power in space science still. And you can see that dismissal again go back to the 1970s where Stuart Brand is raising the issue of the word colonization. This is, of course, you know, 1975 is the American Bicentennial. So there was this ongoing, you know, large-scale re-examination of Manifest Destiny and the logic of the European takeover of the North American continent, especially. So these things are in the air. And, you know, Brand kind of raises up the specter of critique of colonization as a concept only to sort of too easily, I think, swat it down.

He says, well, I'm paraphrasing. He says it's not the bad kind of colonization because there's no one in space to displace. There's no one there anyway. So it's the terra nullius kind of argument that was also, you know, applied to the North American continent and to Australia and to so many places around the globe. But it's empty. So it's there for the taking. But also it'll be the good kind of colonization because, again, you know, the benefits will come back to the world where everybody lives. The benefits of thisively about colonization, because there's so much more going on in the idea and the act of colonization than simply like me showing up and saying, like, I have a gun, I'm going to take your land away from you. And now you're going to be a farmer on the land that you used to own. There's a whole sort of worldview, again, that underlies that act that informs relationships between people and everything

in a world. It informs relationships between people and resources, that this landscape is not there for me to appreciate visually or for me to live in or dwell in. It's there for me to take apart and make use of as I see fit with the industrial logic of capitalism. That this ecosystem that I find here is also something I'm going to rearrange. And I'm going to take these animals and put them over here and breed them for certain characteristics. Take these other animals, put them over here. These I don't need, so I'll kill them for their fur. You know, it's an idea about what worlds are for.

And I think generally it sees sort of networks of relationships that happen, you know, between and among equals and imposes hierarchy on them. That happens right away when there's people on the land that you want to take, right? You have to say, I with the gun, I'm in a higher position in a hierarchy than you who doesn't have a gun, but you have land, right? Which is, you know, what Stuart Brand sort of identifies colonialism with. It's also your labor is worth more doing what I am able to pay you to do than what you want to do, right? That is also part of the logic of colonization. It's, I'm going to make this space for me that you aren't allowed into and you have that space over there is part of the logic of colonization, which all takes place after that act of displacement, after that act of guys in boats with that, the toxic relationship between people and worlds that is bound up in all of those acts is something that I think happens at our peril.

And I think people in space science should really pay attention to the bevy of voices. And I'm thinking of the Just Space Alliance and so many other people who are really saying, hey, we should not use language like that because of this sort of complicated and toxic worldview that goes along with it. I think an essential point. And, you know, I think what you're describing there really brings us back to something that we were talking about in the beginning, right? How Elon Musk wants to create a second Earth effectively to take what we have here and

to place it on Mars and to grow a second human civilization there that is, you know, very similar, if not the same to what is going on right here, even though he might say differently sometimes, but I think we can see he's kind of full of shit there. And at the same time, Jeff Bezos says that, you know, he just wants to extend humanity further into space, you know, exactly how it exists today, you know, the best of us, whatever, but, you know, it's effectively the same sort of society just moved into these space colonies and getting resources in different ways, but still driven by the same kind of logics of constant growth. You know, Jeff Bezos says that our choices between stasis and rationing, if we stay here on earth or, you know, growth and

dynamism, if we go out into space, right. So there's this very particular idea of, you know, what should be driving human society and what kind of society that we should have. And I think in the book, you really kind of call that out, right? You really kind of question this idea that's driving so many of these, these notions, you know, if we are going to go to space, whether it should be driven by these kind of logics, and and what is kind of wrapped up in that. And so probably to close this conversation, you know, how should we be thinking about these ideas and whether we should still have a society that's driven by these ideas and what implications that has both for how we think about space, but also how we think about what happens here on earth as well.

Yeah, I think that's a really important sort of core question to ask. I always think of, again, that kind of the application of the logic of the multiplier that Bezos uses in his rhetoric about going to space that, okay, we have about what, seven or eight billion people on Earth right now, seven or eight billion humans. If we simply apply a multiplier to get our society of a trillion in the solar system, sure, we get 1000 Mozarts or 1000 Einsteins or whatever. We also get millions of people dying of starvation, like every hour. So if there isn't a rearrangement of the status quo, if there isn't an opportunity that is taken, that is presented by the challenge and possibility of going into space, into this strange new environment, and if we don't take advantage of the novelty at large and the opportunity to re-examine, you know, not only our technical capacity, but our values, then I think, you know, the responsibility for millions of people dying of starvation every hour

is on us because we made the plan. If we were the ones who made the plan that brought that world into being, then you have to take not only credit for the thousand Mozarts, but blame for the millions of starvation deaths. On the other hand, there are ways in which we could sort of consciously make choices that lead to other futures and other worlds. And the frameworks for making those other choices are also bound up in the history of the idea that humans should go and live in space. At the sort of high watermark of the space race in 1967, the United Nations put forth, and it was ratified by dozens and now over 100 countries, the Outer Space Treaty, which is a very utopian document. And it enshrines in an international law some of those values that I think we should bring to space.

It highlights and raises up and requires that nations who go to space and individuals who go to space act on a basis that guarantees mutual aid, so that if there is another person who lacks anything in space, someone else in space is able to provide what they lack, they're obligated to give that to the person in danger. If someone knows about danger in space of any kind, they're obligated to warn anyone else about that danger. So you're obligated to help when there's benefit. You're obligated to warn when there's present danger. You're obligated to refrain from most kinds of military activity in space. Weapons of mass destruction are explicitly banned in space. And so are sovereign claims on territory by nations.

There are so many, like, utopian ideas that, I don't know, accidentally or not, you know, got written into law, into international law, that I think a return to those kind of core values is really important at this historical moment. Yeah, you know, I think it's an essential point. And, you know, we can also see how, you know, these utopian values are there, but there's this growing attempt to chip away at them, you know, as this kind of push for the private space industry and the billionaire space race moves forward. Fred, I think that this has been a fantastic conversation. You know, I think it's given people a lot of insight into what is going on with space today,

but also the ideas that kind of inspire the main people who are pushing it forward. I really appreciate you taking the time today. So thanks so much. Thank you so much, Paris. I really appreciate it. Fred Jarman is the author of Space Forces, A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, and you can buy it from Verso Books. Thank you so much, Paris. I really appreciate it. Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you've been enjoying the show, make sure to go over to patreon.com

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