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Musk is again with one other dose of cosmic doomsaying, contradicting his POTUS greatest good friend, Trump
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Elon Musk is again with one other dose of cosmic doomsaying, just lately telling Fox Information that “all life on Earth shall be destroyed by the solar. It’s steadily increasing, we do sooner or later need to be a multi-planetary civilization as a result of Earth shall be incinerated.”
Oh, good. Simply what we wanted — a billionaire with a plan for a future disaster that’s roughly 5 billion years away. It’s a daring, apocalyptic flex that places Musk in direct battle along with his political buddy Donald Trump, who famously declared local weather change a “hoax.”
Together with his current Fox Information remark, it appears Musk, in his quest to LARP as humanity’s savior, by accident turned the previous president right into a local weather denier on the flawed finish of the timeline.
Skipping the disaster in entrance of us
The irony is thick. Musk desires to evacuate the planet to keep away from an extinction occasion billions of years away, whereas Trump’s model has lengthy been about ignoring the one at present unfolding. It’s like watching two guys argue over whether or not the Titanic ought to fear about an iceberg whereas it’s already taking over water.
Musk’s plan for humanity to change into a multi-planetary species is the last word billionaire fantasy — a imaginative and prescient of Mars colonies and red-dirt homesteads that sounds nice till you do not forget that Mars is a frozen, airless wasteland. But Musk appears extra involved with prepping for this sci-fi pipe dream than addressing the very actual, very quick local weather disaster right here on Earth.
As just a few notably sharp tweets put it:
One other added, “Why escape to Mars when Musk’s corporations contribute to Earth’s mess? Repair the planet first, local weather change gained’t wait a billion years. His plan seems like a billionaire’s exit technique, not humanity’s salvation.”
These tweets nail it. Musk isn’t crafting a survival plan for humanity. He’s promoting a narrative — the type that turns shareholder conferences into TED Talks and fuels his legend as a visionary. However narrative engineering solely goes to date when the world is kind of actually on hearth.
Mars or bust — however what about the remainder of us?
Musk’s fixation on Mars isn’t simply bold — it’s a distraction. It diverts consideration, assets, and expertise away from fixing the crises we really face. He’s pouring billions into rocketing people to a different planet, whereas the one we’re standing on is coping with report warmth waves, vanishing coastlines, and ecosystems in collapse.
It’s the last word billionaire play: ignore the mess you helped create (hey, Tesla factories and their not-so-green provide chains) and promote individuals a dream of escape as an alternative.
A billionaire’s exit technique
It’s exhausting to not surprise if Musk’s Mars fixation is much less about saving humanity and extra about constructing an exit technique for the super-rich. When the seas rise and the skies darken, at the very least the Musks of the world can wave at the remainder of us from their climate-controlled Martian domes.
However for the remainder of us, that’s not a viable possibility. We will’t all blast off to Mars. We’re caught right here on this blue marble, wrestling with the implications of local weather denial and company greed.
So perhaps it’s time to ask Musk and his fellow billionaire escapists to place down their Martian maps and choose up a shovel. The planet doesn’t want a house cowboy proper now. It wants somebody keen to dig in and repair the world we now have. As a result of, as a lot as Musk would possibly dream of a life on Mars, most of us are simply making an attempt to outlive on Earth.