Space Billionaires and the Theology of Abandonment

Mars colonization rhetoric is Earth nihilism with better branding

Elon Musk’s January 2020 tweet landed with the cheerful certainty of a tech keynote: “There will be lots of jobs on Mars!” The half-million-dollar ticket price came with a solution: loans, payable upon arrival through labor. Space colonization meets the gig economy.

The internet immediately identified this as indentured servitude with a better user interface. Critics pointed out that the Thirteenth Amendment might not apply on another world. But focus on the legal mechanics misses the more interesting pattern: even in a utopian vision of humanity spreading across the solar system, the relationship between capital and labor remains exactly as it is here. The future isn’t about liberation. It’s about extending the payment plan.

Imagine the paperwork. The Mars Debt Restructuring Agreement, with compound interest calculated across orbital periods. Credit scores for interplanetary immigrants.

Late payments here would follow you to the red planet in their algorithms. Collection agencies operating across 140 million miles of vacuum. LinkedIn influencers posting about “exciting Mars career opportunities” with the same enthusiasm they currently bring to “transformation theater” and “growth mindset.” The insurance industry’s actuarial tables for radiation exposure, failed life support systems, and the statistical likelihood that your employer literally controls your oxygen supply.

Not satire. The logical endpoint of treating Musk’s destination as a business model rather than a thought experiment. The debt mechanics were never the interesting part. What’s interesting is that we’ve normalized discussing them at all.

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But the mechanics of exploitation aren’t the real tell. When tech oligarchs talk about Mars colonies, listen to the tense they use. “Become multiplanetary or die,” Musk posted on X in 2024. “That is the choice we face.” Not a choice we might face. Not a distant possibility requiring contingency plans. The destruction is already baked in. We’re just waiting for the event.

Stephen Hawking adopted identical language, predicting humanity “will have to populate a new planet within 100 years if it is to survive.” The threats he cited (climate change, asteroid strikes, epidemics) were presented not as problems to solve but as inevitabilities to flee. The logic is recursive: we must leave because our home is dying, and our home is dying because, well, we’re leaving.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has pushed back directly: “Mars is not an escape hatch for planet Earth.” But this misunderstands what the framing is doing. The ejection seat doesn’t have to work. It only has to exist in the imagination.

It’s like scheduling the fire escape installation for three decades after the building has already burned. IPCC demands 45% emissions cuts by 2030 to maintain a 1.5°C pathway. SpaceX promises Martian self-sufficiency by the late 2050s: seven to nine years after establishment begins, they claim. Climate tipping points arrive now, at 1.4°C. The timeline doesn’t add up. That’s the point.

Consider the corporate project plan. Mars Colony Viability: Q4 2050, optimistic. Climate Tipping Points: Q2 2024, already happening. Board recommendation: Proceed with off-world investment. Cite failsafe story in quarterly earnings call. Redirect climate adaptation funds to interplanetary logistics. The spreadsheet makes perfect sense once you understand which sphere you’re planning to be on.

The parachute cannot deploy before the plane crashes. That’s not a bug in the plan. It’s the whole point.

And once you’ve accepted this logic, the real question isn’t prevention. It’s lifeboat logistics.

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Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff arrived at a luxury resort expecting to discuss technology’s future. Instead, five hedge fund billionaires posed a different question: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?” The capital-E Event, already named in their minds.

They weren’t planning to prevent collapse. They were planning to survive it. Their questions were logistical: New Zealand or Alaska? Armed guards or loyalty collars? Payment in cryptocurrency after governments fell.

The consulting industry this spawns practically writes itself. The PowerPoint decks: “Post-Apocalyptic Human Resources: Optimal Protocols for Incentive Alignment in Uncertain Futures.” The LinkedIn job postings: “Excited to announce I’ve joined Doomsday Dynamics as VP of Security Force Loyalty!” The annual conferences where wealthy preppers network and compare bunker specifications like suburban parents comparing school districts.

That same logic has a name. Rushkoff calls it “the Mindset.” The belief that enough money and technology can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality. You can build a car fast enough to escape its own exhaust, which is another way of saying you can outrun physics if you’re rich enough. You can earn enough to insulate yourself from the consequences of how you earned it. He calls this second belief “the Insulation Equation,” and it explains a lot about the drive toward space.

Because Mars isn’t a contingency plan, it’s a permission slip. A genuine contingency would involve making the Martian surface habitable before our home world becomes uninhabitable. The schedule doesn’t support this. A genuine contingency would involve infrastructure that could support billions, not a million colonists by 2044. A genuine contingency would be public, not a corporate venture where SpaceX already claims Mars as a “free planet” beyond any government’s jurisdiction.

What this destination actually offers is something more psychologically valuable: permission. Permission to keep extracting, keep accumulating, keep treating our world as a resource to be depleted rather than a home to be maintained. Because we’re leaving anyway. Because someone is building the ark.

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Flood narratives appear across cultures with identical elements: a corrupt world, divine judgment, chosen survivors, a vessel of escape. The theological function is to separate the worthy from the doomed. Noah brings his family and two of every animal, not everyone. The sinners drown. In the discourse, that’s not tragedy. It’s the point.

Space colonization language operates within this structure whether its proponents recognize it or not. Researchers in the journal Zygon have analyzed Carl Sagan’s space advocacy as “religious texts with a doctrine of salvation.”

The story identifies the threat (primitive impulses, planetary destruction), the savior (science and rockets), and the destination (cosmic maturity, interstellar civilization). This is salvation machinery dressed as engineering ambition.

Musk positions himself as the prophet of this creed. SpaceX exists, he says, specifically “to make life multiplanetary.” Progress is measured not by earthly metrics but by “the timeline to establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.” Every Starship launch is about “learning what’s needed to make life multiplanetary.” The language is almost liturgical.

When Musk tweets “become multiplanetary or die,” mainstream coverage debates the schedule and viability. Not the premise. No one asks why abandonment became a serious policy position.

Climate journalism covers “the race to Mars” alongside “the race to 1.5°C” as if these are equivalent endeavors rather than opposite choices. Picture the editorial meeting: both stories get the same priority, the same coverage tempo, the same analytical framework. Colony progress and climate catastrophe prevention, both filed under “Future Planning.” One involves reducing emissions and adapting infrastructure. The other involves accepting that some people have escape velocity and others don’t. But they get the same word count, the same deadlines, the same assumption that both are reasonable responses to the same problem.

Something shifted to make this normal. “Some people will be saved, most won’t” stopped being dystopian fiction and started being business strategy. Most people in tech, media, or policy don’t believe they’re enabling abandonment theology. They’re just building rockets, covering launches, analyzing viability. Which is how absurdity becomes infrastructure: one normalized choice at a time.

Ark stories require a flood. They require most of humanity to be left behind. The chosen survive because the unchosen don’t. Once you’ve decided you’re building the ark, you’ve made certain assumptions about the people who won’t fit.

But not everyone is building the same ark.

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Jeff Bezos offers a different vision. Same mechanism, different marketing. “Earth is the best planet,” Bezos has said. His Blue Origin frames space travel as terrestrial preservation, moving heavy industry off-world to protect “this gem of a planet.” In Bezos’s telling, we don’t leave our home. We keep it pristine while the dirty work happens elsewhere.

This vision has its own absurdities. At the 2018 International Space Development Conference, Bezos said: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” The contradiction barely registers. We must stay and we must leave.

Listen to how the contradiction resolves. Our sphere becomes, in Bezos’s telling, “zoned residential and light industry.” Heavy, damaging industry moves to orbit.

It’s the Homeowners Association as cosmic destiny. One guy writing the bylaws, approving his own additions, and billing everyone else for the landscaping. Rocket launch noise complaints reviewed by the person launching the rockets. The committee meeting to decide orbital access would itself need to happen in orbit.

At the same conference, Bezos spoke of “a trillion humans” living in O’Neill colonies. His vision carefully avoids the question of access. Critics have noted that even expensive San Francisco real estate would seem cheap compared to manufactured habitats in space. The trillion humans are wealthy humans. The rest presumably stay behind to enjoy a world zoned residential but owned by whom? Property rights extended into vacuum. The same people making the rules who already control the terrestrial game.

Both visions share a common assumption: whether Musk’s apocalyptic Mars destination or Bezos’s bucolic Earth with orbital industry, the current arrangement of wealth and power should persist indefinitely. Just across a larger territory. Neither imagines a different social structure. Both extend extraction into the cosmos.

As historian Ted McCormick has observed, the promises these space moguls make “are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago.” The same colonial logic of solving problems through expansion rather than reform.

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But does the logic even work on its own terms? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith spent years researching what establishing a Martian settlement would actually require. They originally intended to write an enthusiastic guide to our spacefaring future.

Instead, their book A City on Mars became a catalog of viability problems so severe they “turned into space settlement skeptics.”

The radiation exposure alone (0.66 sieverts for a round trip) exceeds career safety limits by a factor of three. There’s no evidence children could be conceived, gestated, and raised to adulthood in Martian gravity. The governance structures required for closed-system survival would “probably shift toward authoritarianism.” Someone has to decide who breathes when the recyclers fail.

Most tellingly, their conclusion cuts through all the discourse: even “a hypothetically devastated Earth would be more habitable than other options in the Solar System.”

This last point should end the conversation about insurance policies. You could detonate every nuclear weapon ever built, and the resulting sphere would still have breathable air, drinkable water, and arable soil. The red planet has none of these. The backup plan is a parachute woven from concrete. It offers the comfort of a solution without any of the functionality.

Yet rational viability and psychological function operate on different frequencies. It’s like explaining to someone buying lottery tickets that the odds don’t support their retirement plan. They know. But the fantasy is doing different work than the math.

The language provides a story about who matters and who doesn’t, about what the future holds and who it holds it for. It provides cover for resource allocation decisions that look different when you can’t point to the ark being built in the background.

Every dollar SpaceX raises for interplanetary colonization represents capital, attention, and engineering talent not directed toward carbon capture, grid transformation, or climate adaptation. That’s not inevitable physics. That’s choice. Someone keeps choosing this. It’s like renovating the penthouse while the foundation cracks. Capital follows belief, and belief follows story, and the story says our home is disposable because we’re going multiplanetary. Except “we” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

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“Abandonment” might seem strong. But consider what this off-world fantasy actually communicates: that our home is not worth fighting for. That some problems are too big to fix and the correct response is to leave. That the appropriate relationship between the extremely wealthy and the rest of humanity is separation. Vertical, by rocket, into a future where the money equation no longer requires the masses.

This is theological in the old sense. It’s about who gets saved, and by what mechanism, and at whose expense. The discourse of multiplanetary humanity isn’t really about engineering. It’s about establishing a framework in which certain lives have escape velocity and others don’t. In which the people who accumulated resources by extracting from the commons are justified in taking those resources elsewhere. In which the flood is coming and the ark has a guest list.

Whether colonies on other worlds are technically workable never mattered. What matters is what this particular fantasy reveals about the relationship between extreme wealth and the rest of humanity.

What does it mean that we treat this as normal? That abandonment entered mainstream discourse not as dystopian warning but as legitimate futurism? That we debate the schedule and practicality of off-world settlements instead of asking why “alternative planet” became something serious people discuss in serious publications?

Most people reading this work somewhere in that machinery. Engineering the rockets, reporting on the vision, building the infrastructure, analyzing the business models, or just accepting that space mogul programs are normal news rather than expensive performance art. The flood doesn’t require divine judgment. It just requires enough people to accept that some humans have escape velocity and others don’t, and to keep building the systems that make that separation possible.

Listen to the tense they use. The shift from “we might need to” to “we will have to” to “we are going to” tells you everything. Abandonment moves from possibility to inevitability to accomplished fact. Resource allocation follows belief. Political will follows resource allocation. And the framing has already moved past asking permission.

We aren’t leaving Earth. They are. And somewhere in the middle of that sentence is where most of us actually live: not building arks, not drowning yet, just bailing water while pretending the boat isn’t sinking and the lifeboat isn’t already gone. Every day you do this, the ark gets a little more real and the flood becomes a little more inevitable.

The theology doesn’t require faith. It just requires inertia. And inertia, as it turns out, is what we do best.

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