MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: AI Overlords, Area Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Campaign to Management the Destiny of Humanity, by Adam Becker
Elon Musk predicts that a million Earthlings will likely be residing on Mars in 20 years — not only for the thrilling journey however as a matter of survival: “We should protect the sunshine of consciousness by changing into a space-faring civilization & extending life to different planets.”
Not so quick, says the science journalist Adam Becker. As he places it in his good and splendidly readable new e book, “Extra Every little thing Endlessly,” life on Mars is certain to be worse than life on our personal planet, nevertheless a lot ecological havoc we’ve wreaked.
Becker, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is the writer of a previous (equally readable) book about quantum theory, clearly lays out the various issues of attending to, and surviving on, the Purple Planet. There may be the not insignificant subject of monumental quantities of floor radiation. There may be additionally the not insignificant subject of the poisonous mud. Publicity to Martian air will boil the saliva off your tongue earlier than it asphyxiates you.
And even when astronauts handle to construct a system of pressurized tunnels for residing underground — a really huge if, given the difficulties of getting astronauts there, not to mention building supplies — the variety of individuals residing in such bunkers must be fairly small. They might require common shipments of meals and water from Earth, presumably by way of Musk’s firm SpaceX. “Even the air the Mars residents breathe would price cash,” Becker writes. It appears like a depressing option to dwell. “Mars would make Antarctica seem like Tahiti.”
The plan to colonize Mars is simply one of many fantastical eventualities Becker writes about in “Extra Every little thing Endlessly,” which traces the assorted plans superior by billionaire tech entrepreneurs of their grand bids to “save humanity.” From synthetic intelligence to colonizing outer house, the animating pressure behind such initiatives is what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation.” The concepts it propagates have three most important options, he says. First, they’re reductive. Second, they’re worthwhile, aligning neatly with the tech business’s crucial of perpetual development. Third, and most essential, they provide transcendence — the promise of an imagined finish that justifies blowing by means of any precise limits, together with typical morality.
