Pushkin.
You are looking at a live view of the Falcon Heavy.
In twenty eighteen, Elon Musk's company SpaceX launched a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida under blue skies streaked with clouds. A giant white rocket attached to two smaller white boosters stood perched on the launch pad.
All systems are Golfer launch.
A crowd assembled at mission control giddy and loud. This was the company's splashiest launch yet of its biggest rocket built for a Mars crossing orbit.
Stacked inside the firing is Elon's cherry red Tesla Roadster.
Then there was the payload described by SpaceX in its live broadcast.
And inside of it a passenger. His name is Starman, but don't worry, he's not human.
There was also an arc, a sort of Noah's Ark of an archive on a space Proof Courts compact disc.
On the arc that's being launched today. The Foundation has stored Isaac Asimov's classic sci fi series, the Foundation Trilogy.
One objective of this test flight was to put a Tesla Roadster carrying the works of Isaac Asimov into orbit for a billion.
Years three two.
Welcome to X Man The Elon Musk origin story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian, and for a long time I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future in political discourse, in literature and
science fiction, and even common bucks. The series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism, call it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices can be driven by dreams and fantasies that come from science fiction. Last episode, I looked at Musk's early life in South Africa, growing up reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He ended up in Silicon Valley in the nineteen nineties, founding a company called x dot com that merged with PayPal. eBay
bought PayPal for one point five billion dollars. Musk use that money to start SpaceX. He also started talking about very big plans for the future of humanity.
When I was in the university, I thought about what would most affect the future of the world, and the three areas that I came up with the Internet, sustainable energy and making life multiplanet.
Terry Musk began to argue that his plan was to save the human race, including by going to Mars. But why future of humanity questions used to belong to religion and philosophy. Under Muskism, they belonged to engineering and entrepreneurship. How did that happen? This episode of X Man is called Planet b strap in to head to Mars, which is where Elon Musk was headed before he took a
detour to the White House. In twenty sixteen, the year Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, Musk spoke to an audience at a SpaceX event about the ship he'd like to take to Mars.
I think like maybe the name of the first ship that goes to Mars.
My current favorite is Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and.
I like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability. I think ourship is also extremely improbable.
One pretty useful way of understanding Musk's vision for SpaceX is that it's Douglas Adams fan fiction. Or you could make a fair argument that SpaceX's inspiration comes from the Foundation series.
Titally Foundation author Isaac Asimos Encyclopedia Galactica one hundred and sixteenth edition.
This Encyclopedia Galactica runs through all the Foundation Series, and if that sounds familiar, that's because the Hitchhiker's Guide is a lampoon of it.
The Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the Great Encyclopedic Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom because, although it has many omissions contains much that is apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important ways. First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words don't Panic inscribed in large, much friendly letters on the cover.
That Tesla roadster that must send up into space had a copy of Asimov inside, and it also had don't Panic on its dashboard. Asimov's Foundation Series revolves around a scholar named Harry Selden.
W Nine hundred and eighty eight years of the Galactic Event died twelve sixty nine.
Birthplace Heliconnor of Toardus sector. Harry Selden is responsible for the future of humanity. His plan Engineers will save us Selden knows that the Galactic Empire will soon collapse, after which the galaxy will endure a dark age. He's got a plan to hide away two sets of experts, one at each end of the galaxy, the two Foundations, to
store the knowledge of civilization. Elon Musk read the story as a kid, and later said that the lesson he drew from it was that you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, to minimize the probability of a dark age, and reduce the length of a dark age. If there is one anxiety about the imminent end of civilization. Existential catastrophism is an essential feature of Muskism. Humanity, in this understanding of
the world is always at risk of extinction. Entrepreneurs and engineers are trying to save us.
All.
I got to wondering where this idea came from. When did people begin worrying about human extinction?
That's a good question, So it depends on what you mean by worrying.
That's Thomas moynihan, author of the twenty twenty book X Risk, How Humanity Discovered its own extinction. I called it moynihan to ask him about the history of the panic. Don't panic about human extinction, which is different from a religious worry about the coming apocalypse.
The apocalypse scures a senseiment ending, where extinction anticipates the ending of sense.
According to Moynan, people started worrying about human extinction sometime in the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment, partly because scientists studying fossils had begun to observe and to document the extinction of other species, like dinosaurs. This fascinated romantic poets.
Byron himself refers to using steam engines to deflect incoming asteroids and stop them from wiping out humanity.
Mary Shelley, a decade after she wrote Frankenstein, wrote The Last Man, the first novel in English that imagines human extinction by way of a global pandemic. By the end of the nineteenth century, you get science fiction that imagines a risk coming from other planets.
Nothing out of the shadow, like a gray snake.
Martians came to Earth in H. G. Wells's eighteen ninety eight novel War of the World, But as morning Hand points out, Wells also thought of other plants as a way to avoid human extinction.
Thankies a gentleman, sind describers, I can highly force myself to keep.
Working at it. At the end of War of the World's he mentions that humanity might be able to migrate to Venus in the long term, and that would somehow prolong the lifespan of civilization.
But of course, early science fiction emerged during an era of imperialism. After all, as Cecil Rhodes himself said, I would annex the planets.
If I could.
HG.
Wells wasn't actually promoting a colony on Venus. He was opposing British colonies on Earth. He began War of the Worlds by talking about British colonial expansion into Tasmania, writing that the Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.
Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain? And if the Martians warred in the same spirit, the line from Welles to Musk is a line of rupture to recycle age of imperialism. Science fiction absent the criticism of imperialism is to erase history. Moynan argues that in the middle decades of the twentieth century, fears of human extinction got ratcheted up after Harshima and during the Cold War, with its concern about nuclear armageddon. The danger was an
alien invasion, the danger was us. By the nineteen eighties, people concerned about what's come to be called existential risk, especially people fighting for arms control, came up with some fancy calculations to try to win the argument.
We shouldn't be thinking about human extinction as just the death of the seven billion people that are currently alive. We need to think about it more as the foreclosure of all the future generations of people that could have been, who could have had worthwhile lives.
This idea really took off. This to me strange calculation by which our lives, the lives of everyone here on Earth, just don't amount too much compared to the lives of all the future beings who won't live if we don't establish colonies on other planets. Then, in the nineteen nineties, moynihan says, a lot of tech people involved in early message boards came together to really panic about a long list of existential risks.
Asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruptions, stellar explosions, nuclear war, climate degradation, and then one that also gets a lot of attention as well is artificial intelligence.
At the time this list was growing on tech message boards, Elon Musk was in college and then in Silicon Valley developing his sense of mission. A few years back, Bernie Sanders tweeted, We're in a moment in history where two guys, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, own more wealth than the bottom forty percent of people in this country. Musk tweeted back, I am accumulating resources to help make life interplanetary and
extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Not everyone thinks Musk and Bezos are heroically saving humanity from extinction. My question is why do they think they're doing that. Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico in nineteen sixty four. Both he and Elon Musk grew up on stories about the Apollo eleven moon landing. The US ended its moon program in nineteen seventy two, Bezos, a Star Trek fan,
always wanted to go back to the moon. Musk tells a story about how, as a kid he went to the NASA website to look up the schedule for going to Mars, and was disappointed to find there wasn't one. In nineteen sixty four, NASA had launched the Mariner for Probe, the first spacecraft to fly by Mars.
The great question is what will matter no reveal, of course, the possibility of life on Mars has been debated for many years. A faint lines seen on the surface have led to the idea that these were canals dug by the Martians. But I don't think anybody gives that far these days.
The Probe sent back twenty one photographs unveiled at the White House before Lyndon Johnson, but the photographs revealed a barren, dusty wasteland, all but crushing any hope. As Johnson said that there was life on Mars, it may be.
It may just be that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought.
That view of Mars started to change in the nineteen nineties, which marked a convergence. Tech types had become consumed with the possibility of human extinction. Jeff Bezos and e On Musk were starting to make millions, even billions of dollars and writers and scientists had begun to imagine ways Mars could be made habitable. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published the Mars Trilogy, in which scientists from Earth
have terraformed Mars. In nineteen ninety eight, an aerospace engineer named Robert Zubrin published a book called The Case for Mars.
There's three reasons why Mars.
Should be the goal of our space program, and in short, it's because Mars is where the sciences, it's where the challenges, and it's where the future is.
Bezos founded his space company Blue Origin in the year two thousand. Musk started SpaceX two years later. In the two and a half decades since, despite painful setbacks, SpaceX has been an engineering wonder, a juggernaut revitalizing space exploration. But even as the richest men on this planet were thinking about traveling to other planets, more and more Earthlings where we'reried about life here on Earth.
Five million students around the world took to the streets and a climate strike Last Friday. Students flood of the streets with a clear message, there is no planet B.
Well, Musk and Bezos were building rockets. There is no planet B. Became the motto of the environmental movement, a way for people to say that space exploration not only fails to address the risk of human extinction, but is instead part of the problem. Even Kim Stanley Robinson took this line.
I still speak positively about us going to Mars and even perhaps some day terraforming Mars, but it's a project for like the year three thousand a d. What I feel I have to say now is to remind people there is no planet b. It's not simple, it's not fast, it isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so we can't be thinking that Earth is disposable.
About twenty years ago, Elon must began to change the way he talked about going to Mars.
Have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there? No, not at all. I Actually I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity on Earth. So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars. Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where we're forever confined to Earth, and the other where we are space frank civilization out exploring the Stars. I think the latter is far more exciting.
SpaceX is about taking science fiction stories and turning them into fact. But what if SpaceX is actually fulfilling the vision of dystopian science fiction by way of Muskism, not only as extraterrestrial capitalism, but as a new political order. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series first appeared as a book in nineteen fifty one, but a more prophetic science fiction story about money and politics and the future of humanity came out in nineteen fifty two.
Merchants, Frederick Poles and C. M. Cornbliss's modern classic about the future when the wizards of high pressure salesmanship take over.
The Space Merchants is dystopian science fiction, later made into a radio drama. The story opens on a blighted, depleted, overcrowded Earth had a board meeting of an advertising agency called Fouler shockun.
Associates, gentlemen, Good morning, good morning.
That's the shotgun.
Now sit down, sit down. I'm going to stand for a moment. I have just come back on the Moon rocket. As you know, I want to streatch my legs.
How he alright, there's a shockun.
Gentlemen, I am proud, and I'm humble when I say it's successful. The mining ventures are bringing the people here on Earth many of the metals our forefathers exhausted long ago. The colonist seemed quite untouched by the Kanci revolutionists, only six instances of kanci' sabitage in the past week.
On this desperate, dying earth, Fowler Shakun is worried about Conci's conservationists, or what we'd call environmentalists gentlemen.
On my trip back from the Moon, I begin to wonder are we getting soft? But now I've decided, Fowler Shotgun Associates is not soft, that it's ready to meet a challenge greater than our development of the Moon, the greatest challenge the world of advertising and promotion has ever met. The colonizing of Beabus.
The Space Merchants wasn't the first version of this dystopian vision. In his story from nineteen oh one with the excellent title to Mars with Tesla, that is, with Nikola Tesla, a guy advertising a rocket trip to Mars turns out to be a con man. In twenty twenty two, in Fowler Shokun Fashion, SpaceX was involved in the first fully private entirely for profit mission to the International Space Station. It carried three space tourists, paying fifty five million dollars
each for a seven seventeen day trip. The Washington Post has reported that SpaceX might be involved in a project to build the first hotel in space. Next up, the Red Planet buzzed back to the past to the US presidential election year of twenty twelve. During that year's contest for the Republican nomination, moderates like Mitt Romney said a plan to go to the Moon was crazy.
I spent twenty five years in business.
If I had a business executive.
Come to me and say they want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on.
The Moon, I'd say you're fired.
The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon and build a colony there.
It may be a big idea, but it's not a good idea.
But far right Republicans like Newt Gingrich endorse this idea.
I'll tell you I do not want to be the country that, having gotten to the moon first turned around and said it doesn't really matter.
Let the Chinese dominate space.
What do we care?
During the US residential election year of twenty sixteen. Gingrich was one of Trump's closest advisors. Then, in the weeks between Trump's election and his inauguration, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both went to see him in Trump Tower. In twenty seventeen, after Trump took office, people started talking about moon fever. As one commentator put it, Trump wanted to make the Moon American again. Americans, though, weren't much behind this project. A poll found that sixty three percent of
Americans wanted NASA to focus instead on climate research. Only thirteen percent favored another trip to the moon. But this didn't stop Trump.
Thank you very much, Vice President Pence for helping. Where's our vice president? Great job? To restore American leadership in space.
Trump directed NASA to alter its schedule and make a priority of sending Americans.
To the Moon.
Our journey into space will not only make us stronger and more prosperous, but will unite it us behind grand ambitions and bring us all closer together.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Can you believe that space is going to do that?
At the end of twenty seventeen, at the White House, Trump made a formal announcement of a new destination.
This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.
It wasn't only about science, he said.
Space has so much to do with so many other applications, including a military application.
What he meant by that became clear A year and a half later.
We're gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the United States Space Command. It's a big deal. Spacecom will soon be followed very importantly by the establishment of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces.
Space isn't so much the next frontier as the next battleground, and Elon Musk and his dream of a multiplanetary civilization that is being funded by American taxpayers. SpaceX and Space Force are two sides of the same bitcoin. SpaceX's military projects have included manufacturing missile tracking satellites and new rockets for Space Force, and developing a rocket capable of delivering
weapons anywhere in the world. By twenty twenty four, SpaceX had received nearly twenty billion dollars in government contracts Trump vowed to increase that funding. We approached SpaceX for a response, but at the time of recording we hadn't received a reply. There is a politics of space. Lately, it looks less like the politics of star Trek, a jfcase New Frontier of exciting science and good government, then like the politics of star wars, a swaggering generals and imperial death stars.
There's also something of a party politics of space, and in the US it's been generally Republican and conservative. This was true long before Musk became a Trump supporter and the GOP's most generous donor in the Senate. The race to space was, for a long time most fiercely endorsed by the Texas Senator and one time presidential aspirant Ted Cruz.
No longer is space just an uninhabited void or a scientific novelty.
That's Cruz in twenty nineteen, sharing a hearing on the emerging space environment. Cruz grew up reading the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, a noted libertarian and author of The Man Who Sold the Moon. Heindline's estate awards the Heinland Prize for Space commercialization. Both Musk and Bezos have won it.
By some estimates, the space sector will grow to nearly three trillion dollars in value in the next three decades alone. It is also my belief that the world's first trillionaire will be made in space.
One purpose of Space Force is to protect the space merchants. Bernie Sanders wasn't the only person on the left to notice the ironies here this daggering inequalities. In twenty nineteen, Trevor Noah, the mixed race South African who hosts the Daily Show on Comedy Central in the US, pictured Elon Musk bringing colonists to Mars.
You gotta admit it would have been kind of funny if Elon Musk waited until they landed on Mars to be like, oh, I forgot to mention you are my space slaves. Now get to work building my base, because then uralize all those rich white people would be slaving away on the Martian fields.
They'll be singing their old Caucasians virtuals.
Trevor Noah tied race to space, but they got tied together again. In twenty twenty, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on May twenty fifth, a Monday. Protests began in Minneapolis that night. By Wednesday, they'd begun to spread across the country. On Thursday, the governor of Minnesota called in the National Guard. On Friday, Trump delivered an ultimatum, tweeting when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That night, as protesters gathered near the White House, the Secret Service rushed
the President to an underground bunker. The next day, May thirtieth, twenty twenty, Trump boarded Air Force one. But where to?
And now it's my high honor and distinct privilege to introduce to you the man whose vision and relentless leadership brought us to this historic day, the forty fifth President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.
Trump hadn't flown to Minneapolis to talk to protesters. He'd flown to Florida to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the long scheduled launch of SpaceX's first manned mission, the first time a commercial space corporation carried people into.
Space, Ignition LPDOT at the balcon nine.
And got.
It.
Was a weird freak of timing this history making moment. Nearly four years ago, the George Floyd protests and SpaceX's triumphant launch.
Big day is a big day.
It wasn't unfortunate freak of timing. Trump took to the stage to his trademark walk on music at the Space Center and started out talking about the protests.
My administration will always stand against violence, mayhem, and disorder.
And it was a hard turn to get to the rocket, but Trump tied the two together. He said, raceso's division. Space brings unity.
Moments ago, as we witnessed the launch of two great American astronauts into space, we were filled with the sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.
For Trump, SpaceX meant America first. Then he introduced an American entrepreneur.
He's a little different than a lot of other people.
He liked rockets.
Elon Musk, congratulations. Congratulations.
That's Trump basking in Musk's space glow. Since then, SpaceX has created the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built. It's become the world leader in space exploration, and Trump, after his defeat in twenty twenty and his failed attempt to overturn the election, has come back to power to winning re election decisively, this time with Musk at his side, his own rocketman SpaceX's engineering accomplishments are incredible, But what
about the costs? What about the risks? Not the existential ones, but the ordinary ones. Watching the SpaceX launch that day almost five years ago, now, all I could think about was a poem by Gil scott Heron from nineteen seventy about the Apollo mission. It's called Whitey on the Moon.
One such poem concerned the fact that millions and millions of.
Dollars are continually sent into out of space while we continue to face the same problems here on the ground.
Scott Heron was writing about everyone left behind, the poor, the needy, and their suffering. His sister bit by a rat getting sicker and sicker, and him with no money to pay the doctor's bill while Whitey's on the Moon. I listened to that poem that day, while Trump and Musk watched that launch. It's still ringing in my ears all these years later, as Trump and Musk dismantle USAID, ending American aid programs around the world while ratcheting up
the MARS program. People have been trying to escape to Planet B for a long time. That doesn't make it the right thing for Planet A. Next time, on X, man Muscism here on Earth, and the story of how the man who sold the Moon became Iron Man.