aeon | ‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life
multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of
humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in
which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because
humanity would be extinct. It would be like, “Good news, the problems of
poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t
any humans left.”’
Musk has been pushing this line – Mars colonisation as extinction
insurance – for more than a decade now, but not without pushback. ‘It’s
funny,’ he told me. ‘Not everyone loves humanity. Either explicitly or
implicitly, some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the
Earth’s surface. They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things
are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.”
They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their
absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty
to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into
the future.’
Musk told me he often thinks about the mysterious absence of
intelligent life in the observable Universe. Humans have yet to
undertake an exhaustive, or even vigorous, search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, of course. But we have gone a great deal further than a
casual glance skyward. For more than 50 years, we have trained radio
telescopes on nearby stars, hoping to detect an electromagnetic signal, a
beacon beamed across the abyss. We have searched for sentry probes in
our solar system, and we have examined local stars for evidence of alien
engineering. Soon, we will begin looking for synthetic pollutants in
the atmospheres of distant planets, and asteroid belts with missing
metals, which might suggest mining activity.
The failure of these searches is mysterious, because human
intelligence should not be special. Ever since the age of Copernicus, we
have been told that we occupy a uniform Universe, a weblike structure
stretching for tens of billions of light years, its every strand studded
with starry discs, rich with planets and moons made from the same
material as us. If nature obeys identical laws everywhere, then surely
these vast reaches contain many cauldrons where energy is stirred into
water and rock, until the three mix magically into life. And surely some
of these places nurture those first fragile cells, until they evolve
into intelligent creatures that band together to form civilisations,
with the foresight and staying power to build starships.
‘At our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path
to be godlike in its capabilities,’ Musk told me. ‘You could bicycle to
Alpha Centauri in a few hundred thousand years, and that’s nothing on an
evolutionary scale. If an advanced civilisation existed at any place in
this galaxy, at any point in the past 13.8 billion years, why isn’t it
everywhere? Even if it moved slowly, it would only need something like
.01 per cent of the Universe’s lifespan to be everywhere. So why isn’t
it?’
Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may
be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me.
‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars
in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a
simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien
civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like
mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities,
each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he
came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current
technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I
mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a
whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’
