The fantasy of colonizing a new planet is the fantasy of a blank slate: imagine what we could do if we didnāt have to take all this existing bullshit into consideration! Imagine if we didnāt have to negotiate with different governments or people and their priorities or contend with our own environment; imagine if, having burned our house down, we could just buy a new one instead of trying to squat in the ruins and fix it! Thereās variants of this type of fantasy across all forms of literature, and by itself, thereās nothing wrong with it. Escapism is fun!
But for a certain type of tech oligarch - the ones who claim to be inspired by science fiction even as they willfully misunderstand it - the deepest lure of a new planet is the prospect of dominion. Itās not about fixing things or long-term survivability for the human race: itās the covetous desire to own, wholly and entirely, both the means of accessing our future and the future itself. There are no labor laws on Mars; no charters of human rights or taxes or checks on their power. Theyāre already technofeudal princelings on Earth; if they can just get that first, crucial toehold on another planet, they imagine, theyāll be emperors.
But precisely because theyāre princelings - which is to say, spoiled, selfish, egomaniacal sociopaths who combine the short-sighted greed of Midas with the hubristic idiocy of seagulls - the unfeasibility of their desires never occurs to them. In their minds, theyāve already done the impossible, and therefore all other impossible tasks must be equally within reach, provided they have enough money. Which, frankly, would be an insane fallacy even if they actually had done anything impossible, as opposed to engaging in garden-variety exploitation, villainy and corruption at a historically notable scale, but that doesnāt occur to them, either, and for much the same reasons.
Namely: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a powerful, amoral man in possession of a cartoonishly large sum of money must be in want of things he canāt actually purchase. This being so, weāre left with a crop of naked would-be emperors tripping over their own exposed dicks while giving 90s JRPG villain speeches about how human water consumption is limiting the potential of AI or how knowledge should be metered out to the proles like electricity or how (and this is a good one) nobody needs to care about the staggering environmental and social costs of allowing billionaires to even exist in the first place because theyāre going to build us a city on Mars, guys, MARS, so why does it matter if Earth turns into a wasteland? Why would you try and put any checks on their power when it risks your potential access to a science fictional future they can only provide if allowed to be laws unto themselves?
Which is, coincidentally, why itās relevant that these guys never understood sci-fi in the first place: because men like them with ideas like theirs were pretty much never the good guys. To quote Kim Stanley Robinsonās seminal 1992 classic Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy about what colonizing and terraforming a new world might actually look like:
Nadia pointed at it. āI did that. I did that. You damned radicals -ā she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard- āyou hate liberalism because it works.ā
He snorted.
āIt does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.ā
āAh, Nadia.ā He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again towards base. āEarth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.ā
