Perhaps that got the people with the means to get away from a less-than-livable Earth thinking about getting farther away. "There's growing speculation that the the trend for billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to research space travel is more than just 'boys and their toys' – it could be a lifeboat to escape a dying Earth." To the Moon, or Mars?
Elysium? Just a way station. "In a New York Times article entitled The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet, Michael Suffredini, who is spearheading the creation of a new 'luxury' space station called Axiom, revealed the details of his designer orbital habitat."
The real goal might be Mars. "Elon Musk has made no secret of his plan to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. He has stressed the importance of ensuring that humanity is a multi-planet species so that there will be seem of us left behind if the worst should happen." It's unlikely that transportation to Mars will be like transportation to Massachusetts Bay, or Botany Bay.
Douglas Rushkoff has written that the overall direction of technological development was about creating an escape route for the super-rich.Perhaps so, although there are, as far as I know, no Wampanoag or aborigines on the Moon or Mars to help the settlers develop the resources. Everything will have to be transported, and the same sort of insurgency that can block a rail line would probably be able to block the supplies getting through to the space port.
He pointed out that combat robots would serve very well to guard the bolt-holes of billionaires remaining on Earth once climate change reached its end-game and described Elon Musk’s planned Mars colony as “less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.”
But then, the niggling details of division of labor have long been a weak spot in science fiction, dystopian or otherwise.
2 comments:
This is all nonsense from journalists who stopped taking science classes because they were hard, and do not understand that their writing is speculative fiction.
None of these people have figured out how to economically protect anyone from cosmic radiation outside of the confines of our planet's magnetic field, without also lifting huge amounts of protective material first. This is an exceptionally well-known problem that even pop authors like James Michener were writing about 40 years ago.
Low earth orbit is a somewhat different story, but there you have problems with decaying orbits, and spacejunk.
This is up there with that "news" story the other day of scientists getting power from raindrops.
I suppose if you believe that there's some sort of evil involved in accumulating wealth in volumes greater than somebody could save up at $10,000 a day since the construction of the Pyramids, you might be inclined to think that buying that sort of cosmic ray protection is simply what a person with sufficient means can do!
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