Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has big plans to abandon our endangered species and colonise 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 Musk’s 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 don’t see that “space represents hope for so many people.”
those who attack space
maybe don’t realize that
space represents hope
for so many people— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2021
In Musk’s 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.
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:
- It is very cold.
- If you die in space, over a very long period of time all of the matter inside you slowly breaks apart and spreads out real far, becoming more space. Space thinks it is better than us.
- Weightlessness is briefly cool until you spill or vomit anything whatsoever, which you will, constantly.
- Also, the food sucks.
- Space is all the matter that couldn’t get its shit together after the Big Bang.
- While backwards time travel seems to be impossible, superluminal space travel does allow for forwards time travel, which means it’s possible a future Elon Musk could return from space on a periodic basis to torment your children, and your children’s children, and your grandchildren’s children, and so forth. This is space’s fault.
- In the above scenario, Musk could also get into politics and it’s not clear what that means for term limits.
- My colleague Whitney Kimball points out that from a grammatical perspective, hate is a verb, and space is a non-entity and therefore cannot be a direct object, thus it is incorrect to say you hate space. While this argument seems ludicrous to me, considering it at all was in and of itself extremely annoying.
- Star Trek: Enterprise was set in space.
- My dad said he was just going out for cigarettes and would be back in a few minutes, but it turns out he was secretly the captain of the Event Horizon, which went into space and never came back.
- You can’t actually go into space. You bring a tiny, rocket-powered can or impermeable suit filled with parts of Earth with you, and stay inside it, or you die.
- Space is a construct of our limited perception. In reality, space is made of tiny little fundamental particles called spacinos, which are sentient, predatory, and hate us. Read more about this theory on my blog.
- It contains the Moon, which I also hate.
In conclusion, space has social, economic, and political effects. Its chief export is deadly meteorites and high-energy gamma-ray bursts. Fuck space.