It takes thousands of people to keep a few alive on the ISS. The plutocrat space race is not serious
"What caught me by surprise [about the billionaire space race] was the number of folks who seem to believe that Musk, Bezos and Branson are trying to “escape” the ravages of climate change for a life in space — and might even succeed in doing so. The notion that the rich will live comfortably high above the Earth while the planet becomes an uninhabitable wasteland has been popularized by movies like “Elysium” and “WALL-E.” The New York Times fueled this fantasy back in 2018 with a story about Axiom’s proposed luxury space hotel, under the headline “The Rich are Planning to Leave this Wretched Planet.”
But as a scifi writer and the spouse of a NASA flight controller, let me assure you that the rich escaping the earth for a space utopia is only a trope in fiction — at least in our lifetimes.
The most comfortable living situation we’ve ever devised above Earth’s orbit is on the International Space Station. The ISS is an incredible feat of engineering — one that the combined space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada have been working on for 23 years now. But life on the ISS is anything but luxurious.
Around half a dozen astronauts live up there at any given time, bouncing around a narrow tube with roommates they didn’t choose and who can’t properly bathe for months on end. The wifi is slow. The food is not Michelin starred, to say the least. Their sleeping situation is akin to a floating coffin. And pooping involves a complicated procedure in a port-o-potty where the door is a plastic curtain and everything floats.
... Space-dwellers must exercise at least two hours a day to keep their bones from turning to goo. They spend a ton of time studying systems and conducting repairs on equipment that frequently breaks because space wants to kill you. Outside the space station, there are micro-meteoroid strikes, extreme temperature fluctuations, the cold welding of metal parts that occurs in a vacuum, and atomic oxygen/ultraviolet degradation. Inside, things frequently break from age and constant use — fans, exercise equipment, and, tragically, the toilets.
The ISS crew is only able to survive up there at all because multiple countries employ thousands of brilliant, highly-trained engineers and doctors and astrophysicists and computer experts whose full-time job is keeping them alive and the ISS functioning. When something does break, these teams scramble to devise fixes. And those fixes — lord, are they tedious...
So rest assured, Bezos and Branson [and Musk] will not be sipping champagne next to their space-pool on Low-Earth Mar-a-Lago. Even if Axiom gets their space hotel built, it’s going to be cramped and dangerous, and when the toilet breaks, someone’s going to have to clean up the floating shit. For all their wealth, billionaires do not have the power to make space a more comfortable place to be than Earth. I can’t tell if they grasp that or not...
And what about Musk’s dream of a colony on Mars, or at least the Moon? Those are astronomically less feasible. The farther away from Earth you’re trying to sustain life in space, the harder it gets. And while they have the benefit of gravity, the surface of the Moon and Mars are covered with a powdery regolith [powdery rock] that gums up mechanisms. NASA is currently working on sending astronauts to live on the Moon as part of the Artemis mission. They’ve been working on Artemis plans for years and will continue to plan for years more before sending the first crew to sleep on the Moon — for a week or two, max. No, there will be no Moon-a-Lago, let alone a Mars-a-Lago, in our lifetimes.
Our billionaires won’t find anything up there but a whole lot of time to sit with the gaping void in their hearts, which space certainly won’t fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they’re constipated as hell from astronaut food.
The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the people most responsible. But at least they will not be able to escape to some other, better place. They will live and die... on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.
-via Salon. This is from 2021 but it's still completely true. Nothing has changed, technology-wise, that would alter this outcome, and the chances this outcome will change within our lifetimes is infinitesimally small, even considering every other tech break through that has happened or is currently in the works.
I continue to firmly believe we are going to beat climate change, but rest assured - no matter what happens, the billionaires are going to be stuck down here with the rest of us.
Author Adam Becker shares 5 key insights from his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusa
And here's a more current source! Nothing has changed on this front in the past five years, and it's vanishingly unlikely that anything will change on this front within our lifetimes.
"Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech billionaires have made surprisingly outlandish claims about what a good future for humanity should look like. Elon Musk has spoken repeatedly about the need to set up a colony on Mars. He has said that he’s going to put a million people on Mars by 2050 by sending one rocket launch a day for years, and that the colony needs to be self-sufficient, surviving even if the supply rockets from Earth stop coming. Musk contends that this is vital for the future of humanity, claiming that our species will go extinct if it doesn’t happen soon. He claims Mars is our lifeboat for civilization.
This is all pure fantasy: Mars is too inhospitable to allow a million people to live there anytime remotely soon, if ever. The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there’s no air, and the Martian dirt is filled with poison. There’s no plausible way around these problems, and that’s not even all of them. Nor does the idea of Mars as a lifeboat for humanity make sense: even after an extinction event like an asteroid strike, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars. Mammals survived the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs, but no mammals could survive unprotected on Mars today."
-via The Next Big Ideas Club, May 2, 2025
Here's the thing: it doesn't matter how impossible the fantasy is if the rich and powerful are deadset on wasting all their resources towards reaching it, even if it means sacrificing us and our world for it. Space colonization may be ridiculous, but our generations have been indoctrinated to see it as the way forward to deflect away from the more imminent issues of climate degradation.
