Musk and JD Vance want to colonize the universe. It’s a horrible idea

Earlier this week, Vice President Nominee JD Vance announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he wants the United States to “conquer the stars.” It’s a reference to his support of Elon Musk, who, at a Trump rally a few weeks ago, declared that he wants to “make science fiction real.” The rhetoric is part of Musk’s effort to establish a human population on Mars and make humanity “sustainably multiplanetary.” But Musk’s dream is my nightmare, and despite what JD Vance says, it shouldn’t “inspire all of us.” For context, JD Vance and Musk aren’t alone in such an aspiration. Jeff Bezos, who has his own space exploration company, Blue Origin, remarked last year that he’d “love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system.” Richard Branson, who founded space tourism company Virgin Galactic, once noted that he too is “determined to being a part of starting a population on Mars.” Forget luxury real estate and financial tech — space, and specifically the expansion of human civilization beyond Earth, has become the latest obsession of the ultra-wealthy. Musk, for example, argues we should ensure the preservation of “the light of consciousness,” and that we must colonize Mars “before something happens on Earth to prevent that.” By this he means existential threats, “for example nuclear war, a supervirus or population collapse that weakens civilization to the point where it loses the ability to send supply ships to Mars.” We are not anywhere near morally advanced enough to begin colonizing the universe. To not do so would be, as one philosopher put it, an “astronomical waste.” But this wouldn’t make sense if many of those lives were bad, much like the current state of Earth.