Musk is no explorer he is a flag planter. He has no longing for scientific discovery, no desire to understand what makes Earth so different from Mars, how we all fit together and relate. Musk has used the medium of dreaming and exploration to wrap up a package of entitlement, greed, and ego. The influence Musk is having on a generation of people could not be more different. Everyone who references Sagan as a reason they are in their field connects to the wonder of being human, and marvels at the luck of having grown up and evolved on such a beautiful, rare planet. Sagan inspired generations of writers, scientists, and engineers who felt compelled to chase the awe that he dug up from the depths of their heart. Like Sagan, Musk exhibits a religious-like devotion to space, a fervent desire to go there, but their purposes are entirely divergent. Musk is not from Mars, but he and Sagan do seem to come from different worlds. It is not in the realm of hospitable to humans. But visiting as a proof of technology or to expand the frontier of human possibility is very different from living there. Granted, walking around on Mars would be a life-changing, amazing, profound experience. Musk thinks that Mars is like Earth? For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground, and what is not enticing about living in a tunnel lined with SAD lamps and trying to grow lettuce with UV lights? So long to deep breaths outside and walks without the security of a bulky spacesuit, knowing that if you’re out on an extravehicular activity and something happens, you’ve got an excruciatingly painful 60-second death waiting for you. Mars has a very thin atmosphere it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many). The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. He says with incredulity, “This is not true. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”īut there Musk cuts himself off and begins to laugh. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Musk reads from Sagan’s book: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. The Pale Blue Dot photograph that inspired Carl Sagan’s book of the same name.
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