Utopia or extinction: The space visions driving Bezos and Musk

What if life in space felt like life on a Hawaiian island, with the best weather all year long? Crops growing in fields laid out in bucolic, tropical countryside in an artificial but familiar and comfortable atmosphere, illuminated by our sun?

Billionaire Jeff Bezos, of Amazon and Blue Origin fame, foresees this vision for millions, if not billions of humans, into the centuries ahead.

Heavy manufacturing, and polluting industries are operated off world, allowing Mother Earth, still inhabited by humans, to return to its Edenic state.

Now, imagine another future. An asteroid approaches Earth at a velocity and size that humanity can’t stop. Its collision with Earth sends up billions of tonnes of debris into the atmosphere, creating an artificial winter that chokes off life as we know it. Humanity on Earth faces extinction.

But thankfully, 225 million kilometres away, humans are living and thriving. On Mars.

The red planet has been adapted for human life, through a process called terraforming, which would raise the planet’s temperature and make the atmosphere more hospitable for human life.

This is billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s vision for humanity’s interplanetary future.

It can be difficult to see, but these are the broader visions – multi-year, multi-decade, and frankly, multi-century – that the two billionaire space entrepreneurs are pursuing.

Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink are further ahead in his race to make humans an interplanetary species, and to “back up” – in the IT sense – humanity.

Most of Musk’s businesses (SpaceX, Starlink, even SpaceX-division The Boring Company) contribute in some way to the goal of colonising Mars.

Musk was inspired to get into the rocket business in the early 2000s when he learnt that NASA could not put a greenhouse on Mars. But his fascination with a Mars colony goes back to his youth, when he read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel, Foundation, in which a civilisation is preserved from collapse by finding refuge on a remote planet.

Since the early 2000s, his Falcon 9 reusable rockets “have single-handedly transformed the industry”, lowering the cost of launch and altering the economics of putting payloads into space. This venture – and Tesla – have made Musk immensely wealthy, worth an estimated $US342 billion ($538 billion).

Musk plans to use revenue from his satellite-based internet service Starlink to fund Starship, the enormous, reusable 100-person rocket to move humans to Mars.

In 2019, upon the launch of Starlink’s first operational satellites, Musk was quoted as saying: “We think this is a key stepping stone towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon.”

But Musk’s wealth would be only a fraction of what would be needed to get humanity to Mars, a planet where Homo sapiens would need to be sheltered from cosmic rays, provided food and protected from powerful dust storms in an inhospitable atmosphere.

New Yorker writer and Harvard history of professor Jill Lepore sees Musk’s involvement with the US government-demolishing DOGE job as a way to support a Mars mission.

“Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are minuscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth,” Lepore says on a podcast.

“That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE,” she says, referring to Musk’s radical government cost-cutting program, enabled by US President Donald Trump.

Starlink is not just a source for eventual funding of Starship but a tool to legitimise Musk’s vision of politics in outer space. Under its terms and conditions of use, everyone who signs up for Starlink agrees to recognise “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities”, which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says violates the 1967 space treaty that has held the peace in space.

In this way, people seeking faster internet speeds can be instrumentalised to further erode the standing of a democratic government. Musk has effectively engineered influence through X, putting his money and his social media network at the service of Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Likewise, Starlink may serve as a source of political support for his vision of a self-governing Mars colony. Musk even reportedly bought X (formerly Twitter) “to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work”.

So what will life on Mars under Musk’s vision look like? Over a decade ago, he discussed bioengineering a new species better suited to Mars, a planet exposed to the harsh radiation environment of space, the New York Times reported.

Solar panels from Tesla could help heat homes and generate electricity on a planet where temperatures fall as low as minus-153 degrees. People could perhaps live in underground cavities dug out by the boring machines. Perhaps the journey would be impressive. One SpaceX image shows domed villages and passengers on a future version of Starship taking in a zero-G violin recital for entertainment.

In any case, even if he is arguably further along in realising his space vision than rival Bezos, Musk frequently pushes out the timeline for the Mars colony.

In 2016, Musk said a crew would arrive on Mars as soon as 2024. In 2022, Musk posted it would be in 2029. This year, he suggested a Tesla robot could be sent to Mars at the end of next year, and if “those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely”.

Blue Origin

Bezos’ Blue Origin has been less public about deadlines but is equally ambitious, if not aggressive in its development. Blue Origin has more than 10,000 employees and successfully launched its New Glenn rocket in January.

But in the billionaire spacefarers war for attention, Bezos has arguably gained as much notoriety for the celebrity rides on the New Shepard capsule to the edge of atmosphere with space.

Most recently, Katy Perry and Gayle King, of Oprah Winfrey-fame, took part in an all-female, mostly celebrity 11-minute ride to the atmosphere’s border with space.

Louis Anslow, the UK-based curator of the Pessimists Archive, which explores technophobia and moral panic through the ages, says: “In some ways, it feels like Bezos was trying to be the antithesis of Musk who railed against DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion values] – doing an all-female space launch.”

Anslow noted that any desired effect on Bezos’ reputation-making “seems to have backfired”.

Blue Origin, funded largely by Bezos’ Amazon fortune, has plans to be bigger than Amazon, a company with a $US1.8 trillion ($2.8 trillion) market cap.

Bezos aspires to move “all polluting industry off Earth”. He admitted to the New York Times, the idea “sounds fantastical … But it’s not fantastical. This is going to happen.”

For Bezos, his space plans date to his time in high school in Florida.

Blue Origin has built a New Glenn heavy rocket which can lower the cost of launch – much like SpaceX – to the point that much larger equipment can be put in orbit; and from there, greater things can be constructed.

“It may take, who knows how many years it will take, but we can set up the preconditions where the next generation or the generation after that will be able to move polluting industry off Earth,” Bezos says.

This will allow humanity to use as much energy and pollutants as needed – but “off Earth”. From there, Bezos sees a future in which humans can “live off the land” of outer space – sourcing materials found on the moon and then asteroids.

Blue Origin is exploring how to use lunar dust to create “solar power systems, power transmission cables, and oxygen for propellants and human consumption”.

That will be the moment when space engineering transforms from modules made in factories on Earth to floating Minecraft-type structures. Humans could use seemingly unlimited amounts of materials to build space colonies, solar power stations on a previously unimaginable scale.

“We get to have this energy-intensive civilisation and use ever more energy per capita, and get all the benefits that we get from that, which are many,” Bezos said in an interview late last year with The New York Times.

For this reason, Bezos has held up examples of what are called O’Neill Cylinders, which are far more otherworldly than the name suggests. The space outposts would mimic earthly towns and communities, using gravity created by their own rotation, to sustain the population of a small town.

Ultimately, however, multi-decade plans require massive and sustained buy-in from the public.

Grabbing and holding the public’s attention is a key component of private space companies.

Footage of Blue Origin and SpaceX’s notable successes and perhaps even more so, the fiery “rapid unintentional disassemblies” of rockets in flight quickly go viral, capturing global attention.

Director of the Australia National University Institute for Space professor Anna Moore says: “People like Musk and Bezos take up so much bandwidth in social media, all you hear is their point of view, and their point of view is very much about the visionary part of it.

“But it means we forget the reality of today how much we depend on space and what opportunities there are for us now,” she says.

However, public support for space can be fickle. Anslow, who studies attitudes towards technology, notes that polls of Americans during the moon race consistently opposed the spending for the ambitious project.

At the time, “it was deemed wasteful and outlandish”. However, as the decades passed, views have changed. Democrats saw it as an example of government’s efficacy, while the Republicans relished the win against the Russians (back before Republicans – and Musk himself – began backing the Kremlin’s views).

Today, Musk’s animating vision is based on the need to avoid catastrophic extinction of humanity. One need only look at our solar system for inspiration – such as in 1994 when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 asteroid smashed into Jupiter.

As Anslow says: “It seems Musk wants to avoid dystopia, while Bezos wants to create utopia – at least, rhetorically anyway.”

Bezos sees another apocalypse: the escalating effects of climate change driven by the deep-seated human need to consume resources. It’s no wonder that the tycoon who figured out how to sell a department store’s worth of product variety across multiple platforms would want to shift the more damaging aspects of consumption offshore.

ANU’s Moore believes Musk and Bezos’ plans are simultaneously a serious step forward for space and also vanity efforts for billionaires.

“They do have an underlying business reason for doing things,” says Moore, as both Blue Origin and SpaceX race to provide low-risk, “cheap enough” infrastructure to access space, to be manufacturing in space, and to be generating power there.

“These things will happen at a certain point,” she says.

Whoever gets there first will be able to benefit, even if it means the winner provides infrastructure for others to be successful, too.

“So it’s not a simple ego-driven story.”

As for the prospect of a society where “a few men with a lot of money make all the decisions”, Moore says it’s not a good idea for space … or any other domain.

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