Elon Musk Is Correct, I Am Specifically Attacking Space Itself and Not Just His Mars Colonization Project – Gizmodo

Space, as seen from the Lebanaese town of Bsharri from 1,900 meters above sea level in July 2021.Photo: Ibrahim Chalhob (Getty Images)

Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has big plans to abandon our endangered species and colonize Mars, under the theory that a planet whose conditions are inimically hostile to human life will make us less endangered. Fair enough.

To this end, SpaceX is developing the Starship, a prototype rocket that could one day ferry colonists from our doomed world to the Red Planet and is currently slated for its first orbital flight as soon as the next few months. Not everyone is particularly on board with Musks Mars ambitions, citing everything from the colonial perspective that seems inherent to the idea to whether any sort of large-scale settlement of the planet is even possible, at least in the foreseeable future.

Musk has some thoughts on this. In a strange, poem-like tweet on Monday, the billionaire wrote that perhaps these critics just dont see that space represents hope for so many people.

In Musks telling, these undefined critics are attacking the ephemeral concept of space (referring, presumably, to the interstellar void of the cosmos rather than the spatial dimensions that comprise our reality). In this, he is broadly wrong, as critics of Musk mostly fall into two camps: those attacking the systemic inequality that allows him to amass billions for his planetary escape pod while children starve elsewhere, and those attacking his erratic personality in the hopes Tesla stock will fall.

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However, he is not completely wrong. I am attacking space. I will not rest until space knows exactly what kind of piece of shit it is. Give me an army, my compatriots, and I would invade space and raze it to the ground.

Why do I hate space so? Let me count the ways:

In conclusion, space has social, economic, and political effects. Its chief export is deadly meteorites and high-energy gamma-ray bursts. Fuck space.

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Elon Musk Is Correct, I Am Specifically Attacking Space Itself and Not Just His Mars Colonization Project - Gizmodo