Whitey on the Moon: Elon Musk Edition

Elon Musk has always been the most ambitious of all the Brotopians. While his colleagues may dream about building largely unregulated and tax-free cities in Honduras or Venezuela or Nigeria, Musk has been talking about sending a million earthlings (including, possibly, him) to live in a self-sustaining city on freaking Mars within 20 or 30 years. According to a 2024 New York Times article, he had a team working on renderings of this (almost certainly never to be built) city, and was “particularly concerned with making sure the city looks cool” according to their sources. 

Musk has been talking about this delusional dream, and building for it, for more than two decades. He founded SpaceX in large part to provide the rockets necessary to send large numbers of humans on the long voyage to Mars; even his Boring company, which, er, bores holes in the earth, is supposed to be practice for digging out underground cities on the red planet. Musk has argued that a Mars colony would ensure that humanity or at least some small portion of it could survive in case the earth became uninhabitable. 

Now he’s admitting that this is a dream that will have to be deferred. A couple of days ago he announced that he’s putting his Mars plans on hold in order to focus instead on building a “self-growing” city on the moon. Musk, who a year ago was calling the moon “a distraction,” insists the change in plans is all about speed:

It seems pretty clear that Musk’s moon pivot is actually a defensive move, an attempt to fend off competition for a newly reopened lunar landing contract from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Also, a base on the moon could provide a handy launching pad for giant AI data center satellites which, contrary to the laws of physics, Musk seems to believe (or to pretend to believe) would be easier to cool in space. (In fact, it’s harder to cool things in space because there’s no air to help whisk away the heat.) 

But Musk’s ultimate plans go far beyond developing a lunar lander or even building moon bases; it’s all about colonization, and Musk’s dream of “extending the light of human consciousness” to the stars.

Building a city on the moon might at first glance seem to make much more sense than Musk’s plan to “occupy Mars.” It would certainly be easier and cheaper and quicker, as the moon is much more conveniently located. But Musk is really just trading one delusion for another, as the moon would be an even worse place for humans to live than the abundantly inhospitable Mars. 

There are plenty of humongous disadvantages to living on either Mars or the moon, foremost among them a surplus of radiation and a deficit of gravity. But Mars’ thin atmosphere provides a small amount of protection from radiation and meteorites, and its relatively greater gravity would be less damaging to humans, who are after all optimized to work properly with our gravity. Living on the moon, with only ⅙ earth’s gravity, could cause nearly as much damage to the human body over time as living in the zero gravity of the space station, which regularly rotates out its crew. 

“Human bodies really can't handle space,” an article in Scientific American points out. 

Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head, which may be pathological for the brain over the long term—among other things. …

When astronauts spend a month or more in space, their eyeballs flatten, one aspect of a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, which can cause long-lasting damage to eyesight. Bones and muscles are built for life on Earth, which involves the ever present pull of gravity. The work the body does against gravity to stay upright and move around keeps muscles from atrophying and stimulates bone growth. In space, without a force to push against, astronauts can experience bone loss that outpaces bone growth, and their muscles shrink.

When talking about Mars, Musk said that he expected the residents, through “selective breeding,” could evolve into a sort of human-like species better adapted to low gravity but, uh, what!?

There are other little disadvantages to life on the moon. The temperature variation is even greater than on Mars, ranging from +127°C in sunlight to -173°C in shadow. Also, the dust can kill you. Oh, and speaking of circadian rhythms, one day-night cycle on the moon lasts … four weeks. 

There may be reasons to build bases on the moon for short term occupancy. But living there for an extended time would be impossible. Colonization would be a suicide mission. 

And then there’s the question of cost. Getting a couple of humans to the moon or Mars would be expensive enough, but the cost of moving a million people to either one would be, well, astronomical, and we would do much better to spend that money on trying to prevent the earth from becoming uninhabitable in the first place.

When I listen to Musk talking about a “self-growing” city on the moon, all I can think of is that Gil Scott-Heron poem, which seems more and more apt by the day: