Here’s Why SpaceX’s Mission Is Bullshit

(2,000 words)

Upcoming AMA

First, I’d like to publish an AMA — ask me anything — next week. If you have any questions you’d like to ask me about anything I’ve written or said, please leave them in the comments section below!

You’re more than welcome to criticize the positions I’ve defended in this newsletter or elsewhere. I really mean it when I say: please feel free to challenge me, as I appreciate push-back and don’t assume that I’m right about everything! I will do my best to answer everyone’s questions. :-)

“Fuck Earth” — Elon Musk

I have a new article out in Truthdig. Please check it out if you have the time. It argues that Musk and SpaceX are lying to investors. “Duh,” I hear you saying while moving the cursor to close this tab, but I haven’t seen anyone make the particular argument that I advance. Briefly put, it’s this:

1.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that he’ll place “humans” — including “you” — on Mars. But there is no scientifically plausible way for biological humans to survive on the Red Planet.

1.1

Mars is extremely hostile to biological life. It is literally less habitable than Earth was during the mass extinction event 66 million years ago in which all non-avian dinosaurs died out. How do we know? Because mammals survived the asteroid blast and ensuing impact winter. If you were to put a mammal on Mars, it would die almost instantly. Mars has almost no atmosphere, there’s no magnetic field, and the soil (Martian regolith) is literally poisonous. So is the water. Plus the average temperature is -80 degrees F, about 50 degrees lower than the average temperature on the peak of Mount Everest in January. Does living on top of Mount Everest for years or decades sound appealing? Well, it would be a tropical beach paradise with palm trees and coconuts compared to life on Mars.

1.2

Even just getting to Mars will be extremely difficult. High levels of space radiation (which causes cancer, dementia, etc.), the deleterious effects of prolonged microgravity, and the psychological toll of being cooped up in a tiny spacecraft for 9 months make traveling to our planetary neighbor enormously challenging.

There is no Planet B for us, in our current form. The farthest colonies from Earth that biological humans will be able to occupy will be on the moon, or perhaps within large spacecraft like O’Neill cylinders (which themselves pose enormous engineering challenges).

Did you know that the term “cyborg” was specifically coined in the context of space travel? Two authors, writing in 1960, realized that humans won’t survive the harsh conditions of space, and so we’ll need to become cybernetic organisms by merging with machines. The problem is that, so long as any part of us is biological, we will remain vulnerable to the assaults and stressors of space radiation, microgravity, etc. Hence, the logical conclusion reached by subsequent theorists is to not merely merge with machines but replace our biological substrates entirely with a machinic substrate. This leads to the second point …

2.

The only “creatures” who will successfully colonize Mars will be digital in nature. There are two options here:

2.1

We could create autonomous AIs to fulfill our cosmic Manifest Destiny. Think of a more advanced form of Grok. We could give them robotic appendages and launch them to the Red Planet. The problem is that it would be them rather than us colonizing Mars.

2.2

We could upload our minds to computers, and somehow connect these minds to robotic bodies. By transferring our minds to hardware, “we” could more easily survive the brutal conditions of space and treacherous features of Mars.

These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Uploaded humans in the form of software minds could travel to Mars alongside autonomous AI astronauts.

3.

However, at least some of these fully digital beings will need to be conscious, because the central mission of SpaceX is to spread “the light of consciousness” into the solar system and beyond. If these digital beings were to lack the capacity for subjective experiences, they’d be no different than the machines we currently have on Mars. And no one thinks that those machines mean we’ve colonized the planet. But there are major problems with this requirement:

3.1

Mind-uploading might not be possible. It could be that mental states, including states of consciousness, aren’t computational in nature. Maybe minds aren’t “software” running on the “wetware” of nervous systems. Maybe we’ve been misled by the most recent metaphor in a long chain of techno-metaphors: the brain is a machine of some sort, a telegraph, a telephone switchboard, and now a digital computer. If the brain isn’t a computer and our mental states aren’t algorithmic, then mind-uploading won’t be possible.

There are plenty of other reasons mind-uploading might not work. The lumps of Jell-O between our ears, which jiggle every time we move our heads, are the most complex objects in the known universe. Assuming the brain is a computer, we have absolutely no idea what level of detail would need to be simulated in silico to reproduce mental states, including consciousness, or whether this level of detail could be simulated in silico at all. Mind-uploading might be impossible for technological rather than philosophical reasons.

This matters because if mind-uploading is impossible, then digitized humans will never walk on Mars. SpaceX should be very anxious about this.

3.2

More generally, artificial consciousness of any sort might not be possible. What if we build an AI with a completely different cognitive architecture relative to our brains (like the LLMs that run current AI chatbots)? How could we ever know whether it’s conscious or not? What scientifically objective “test” could we use to verify with virtual certainty that it’s conscious?

SpaceX should also be very nervous about this. Without robust verification, there’s no way to be confident that “the light of consciousness” has in fact been extended to Mars, even if Mars is teaming with artificial beings building what appears to be an advanced civilization.

4.

SpaceX will need to solve all of these formidable problems to fulfill its mission of spreading “the light of consciousness” to Mars and beyond. It will need to figure out how to upload our minds to computers, which might be metaphysically or technologically impossible.

If that’s the case, SpaceX will need to figure out which types of cognitive systems can realize states of artificial consciousness, assuming that computer hardware can realize any such states at all. Maybe computer hardware isn’t the right material, with the right properties, to give rise to phenomenal experience.

But even if it is the right material, SpaceX will need to develop a “test” for consciousness, which is an extremely challenging if not impossible task in itself, because consciousness is intrinsically subjective and science relies on objective (non-subjective) evidence. How could you obtain objective evidence for something that’s intrinsically subjective?

Mission Impossible: Four Challenges

The entire mission of SpaceX fundamentally depends on solving these immense problems. Does Musk admit this in public? No, because he’d spook investors, most of whom are under the (false) impression that humans will someday soon live happily in futuristic Martian colonies.

To put the point a different way, here’s a list of the challenges facing SpaceX:

• (a) Figure out a way to terraform Mars so biological humans can live on it. SpaceX would need to create a Martian atmosphere; eliminate the poison in Martian soil and water; overcome the hazards of low-gravity and microgravity, super-subfreezing temperatures, and there being no planetary magnetic field; figure out how to grow crops; and build spaceships that fully protect their inhabitants from deadly space radiation and other lethal hazards during the 9-month trip to Mars. This would be unbelievably difficult, if it’s possible at all. We can’t even terraform Earth — in the midst of a climate crisis that could take 4 billion lives several decades from now — and we tried to create a “closed biosphere” with the Biosphere 2 experiment and failed miserably. We aren’t even close to figuring out how to establish self-sustaining colonies on Antarctica, which is heaven compared to Mars. Good luck doing all of this 142 million miles from Earth. If something goes wrong and you run out of food or oxygen, you’ll have to wait (at least) 9 months for supplies to arrive. While waiting, you’ll die.

Or:

• (b) Figure out how to upload human minds to computers. Then figure out how to connect these disembodied software beings to robotic appendages that would enable them to interact with the Martian environment. Musk and his fanatical fans utterly fail to appreciate the challenges here, assuming these things are even possible.

And/or:

• (c) Figure out how to instantiate consciousness in artificial systems with non-human architectures — some advanced version of Grok.

And, crucially:

• (d) With respect to (b) and (c), devise a highly reliable and accurate “test” to verify that these artificial systems are actually conscious. This is absolutely critical. The entire mission depends on knowing that whatever beings end up on Mars aren’t mindless machines like the rovers currently picking up rocks and conducting little experiments on our planetary neighbor. Pfff.

Musk says he wants to take the “fiction” out of “science fiction.” But doing that will be far more difficult than most people naively assume. This isn’t just about building a giant phallus and launching it into space. There are major open questions in both AI and philosophy that will need to be answered for SpaceX to fulfill its grandiose mission.

No one talks about these, but they’re just as integral to the mission as the science of rockets is — and perhaps even more formidable than the famously formidable challenges posed by rocket science. Like brain surgery, rocket science is “very complex”:

Musk cannot wish away these challenges. He’s a professional bullshitter, but reality keeps slapping him in the face. That’s why, as I write in the Truthdig article:

[G]ullible investors remain entranced by his messianic aura. In 2016, Musk confidently predicted a self-sufficient Martian colony with 1 million people by 2024. That same year, SpaceX announced that it was “planning to send [the rocket] Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018.” Musk later “said the first unmanned missions could take place in 2022,” and by 2020 he was predicting the first human missions to Mars by 2026. When named the 2021 Person of the Year by Time, he told the magazine that he’d “be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years.” When 2026 arrived, he shifted once again in promising that “an unmanned Starship would soon depart for Mars, paving the way for human-led missions,” and “if those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.”

Early this year, SpaceX abruptly pivoted from colonizing Mars in the near future “to building a self-growing city on the Moon,” which Musk claims his company “can potentially achieve … in less than 10 years.” He now says that “Mars would take 20+ years.”

Lol. He will, of course, continue to push back the date beyond “20+ years,” because reality can’t be wished away. As always:

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

Fact of the day: Mount Everest is the tallest peak on Earth — if measured from sea level to the summit. However, it’s not the farthest point away from Earth’s center. That title goes to Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador. This is because Earth isn’t perfectly round: it’s an oblate spheroid, meaning that it’s wider at the equator, like a ball that’s been slightly squashed. (More precisely, Earth has a kind of “pear” shape, as the southern hemisphere bulges a bit more than the northern hemisphere.) Consequently, the point on Earth’s surface that’s farthest away from its center is the peak of Chimborazo, in the Andes Mountains. Re: the numbers, Chimborazo is about 9,000 feet lower than Everest relative to sea level, but nearly 7,000 feet farther away from Earth’s center. Now you know!