The Myth of Mars Colonization: Elon Musk’s Escape Plan and Its Real Risks

I was a teenager when I first read *Dune*. On the surface it gave me everything I thought I wanted — desert planets, secret orders, psychic powers, knife duels, a boy chosen by prophecy to lead an oppressed people to victory. But what lodged under my skin wasn’t Paul’s triumph; it was the dread that came with it. Herbert makes you watch a prophecy become a political technology. The Bene Gesserit plant the messiah myth. Paul, wired with visions of the future, sees the holy war his rise will unleash — worlds burning in his name, billions dead — and then steps into the role anyway because the machinery around him, the narrative around him, makes refusal nearly impossible. Empire arrives dressed up as destiny, and everyone tells themselves it couldn’t have gone any other way.

Herbert treats prophecy the way we should treat tech futurism: not as magic, but as weaponized narrative.

I grew up loving genre fiction — sci-fi, fantasy, the strange stuff. Those books felt closer to the truth than whatever was in front of me. As I got older, I still loved genre, but I followed the strangeness elsewhere: into physics threads, the occult, God, UFO lore, CERN experiments — anything that suggested reality was less stable than advertised.

So when Elon Musk started talking about making humanity a multi-planetary species on Mars, I was primed for belief. Here, finally, was someone with the money and audacity to drag the oddities of imagination into hardware. This was bigger than paperbacks and concept art. Musk had rockets, launch schedules, stainless steel. It felt, for a moment, like we were watching a once-in-a-generation mind lift science fiction into the sky.

Then he kept talking.

Somewhere between the half-answers on podcasts, and the vague hand-waving about “self-sustaining cities on Mars,” another picture came into focus. Not a singular visionary carefully architecting a survivable future, but a very rich, very driven operator whose default answer to every existential question is: build more machines.

On Joe Rogan’s show and elsewhere, Musk casts multi-planetary life as a moral necessity — an insurance policy for human consciousness — but rarely moves beyond the slogan. The plan tends to stop at “build Starship” and “send a million people,” with governance, labor, law, class, ecology, psychology all relegated to “we’ll figure it out when we get there.” That isn’t vision.

If you take Mars seriously — not as a mythic backdrop, but as terrain — the dream of a “sustainable civilization” stops looking like bold futurism and starts reading like an evacuation brochure. Mars is soaked in radiation, wrapped in a thin CO₂ atmosphere with no global magnetic field. Long-term settlers would live underground or behind heavy shielding; a bad seal becomes a mass-casualty event.

Gravity is about 38 percent of Earth’s; we have no real data on what that does to children, bones, hearts, multi-generational health. The soil is laced with perchlorates toxic to humans; growing food requires intensive remediation and fully controlled environments. Any plausible settlement would depend on Earth for decades, maybe centuries — for replacement parts, complex medicines, specialist expertise, cultural media, software, all the invisible scaffolding of a technological society. Miss enough launch windows, lose enough cargo, and your “self-sustaining city” starts to look less like a triumph than an exquisitely funded trap.

A real Martian civilization — one that can outlive its founders — wouldn’t be “rockets plus domes.” It would be a closed-loop ecological, economic, legal, and cultural system functioning under hostile constraints for generations: able to repair itself, educate its children, enforce norms, resolve conflict, adapt to crisis without constant subsidy from Earth. That problem is orders of magnitude harder than anything currently on Musk’s whiteboards, and far beyond the confident sound bites that dominate his stage time.

Here’s the darker possibility: Musk knows that. He is not confused about delta-v or failure modes. Chemical rockets and stainless steel are, at best, brutal bridge technologies — good enough to loft cargo and stunt crews, nowhere near sufficient to guarantee a flourishing, autonomous civilization in another gravity well. If the real solution requires propulsion we haven’t built yet — higher-energy nuclear systems, radically efficient drives, some still-hypothetical field effect — then he also has to know he is unlikely to live to see the version of Mars his myth implies.

But that limitation is easy to alchemize into legend. Our era offers its billionaires a simple bargain: you don’t have to solve the problem; you just have to look like the first person serious enough to point your money at it. If things break right, history doesn’t need Musk to deliver a thriving Mars; it only needs him as prologue.

The archive can always be cut into a neat montage — boosters landing, rockets rising over Boca Chica — and narrated as, “Here is where the great project began.” The performance of attempting becomes the product.

There’s an even tidier escape hatch if you take seriously the way he sometimes scripts artificial superintelligence. Let some future system solve propulsion. Let it design the habitats, close the ecological loops, optimize away the human fragility that makes Mars so unforgiving. In that cosmology, today’s rockets become offerings at the altar of a coming intelligence that will finish the job: proof we wanted to ascend, even if we couldn’t yet. Either way, the story lands in the same place: if Mars ever works, he was the necessary forerunner; if it doesn’t, he was the only one who tried.

Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the hardware problems get solved, the next questions are uglier. Who owns the air in your habitat? Who writes criminal law inside a dome financed and operated by a private company? What happens to a worker who refuses unsafe conditions when “stepping outside” without institutional cooperation is a death sentence?

The Outer Space Treaty bars nation-states from declaring sovereignty over celestial bodies, but it is hazy on corporate control. In practice, governance on Mars would not emerge from some neutral “for humanity” spirit. It would follow contracts, capital, and whoever owns life support.

Early Mars, if it exists, is far more likely to resemble an extreme company town than a utopian commons: exit functionally impossible, every “citizen” also labor, every dispute shadowed by the fact that the boss controls the oxygen. Any serious conversation about “civilization on Mars” that does not foreground labor rights, power structures, jurisdiction, and the possibility of revolt isn’t foresight. It’s world-building.

This is where Musk stops being the protagonist and becomes a symptom. We’ve built an ecosystem that mistakes capital plus confidence for genius plus coherence, that confuses the most visible man with a sci-fi monologue for an original thinker. Genuine original thinking — the kind that can plausibly reroute civilization — requires humility in the face of complexity, literacy that crosses ecology, anthropology, governance, ethics, psychology as readily as propulsion and code, and a willingness to describe the machinery of power: who decides, who pays, who is allowed to refuse.

Instead, we keep rewarding the outline and ignoring the operating manual. Mars becomes the perfect screen for this evasion — a red planet onto which we can project limitless ambition without having to explain zoning laws, unions, or succession plans.

You can see the same pattern in the AI wars. Musk helped found OpenAI, left when its trajectory diverged from his instincts, and has since oscillated between “AI will end us” and “my AI will be the safe one,” launching xAI while attacking OpenAI and Sam Altman in public and in court. On paper, it’s a fight about openness, safety, capture. In practice, it reads like a familiar human drama: a man unwilling to inhabit a future in which the defining story of a technology he helped spark unfolds without him at the center. He does not fund independent, unglamorous oversight; he builds a rival product. He frames existential risk in ways that route back through his platforms. The pattern rhymes with Mars: world-scale stakes narrated through one man’s indispensability.

Herbert’s point isn’t subtle: once you let one man merge his ego with a civilizational story, it becomes almost impossible to tell where sincere vision ends and self-justifying mythology begins.

That’s the lens I can’t unlearn when I watch Elon Musk selling Mars as our moral horizon. The rhetoric rhymes: a hostile future only he is brave enough to confront, a species-level narrative that just happens to pass through his vault, his launchpad, his logo. A crusade framed as inevitable — we must go multi-planetary or die — so the rest of us are invited to feel unambitious or ungrateful if we question the terms. But if *Dune* teaches anything, it’s that inevitability is the most dangerous special effect in politics. There is nothing automatic or neutral about who gets to build a new world, who works it, who owns the air. When a man starts to sound like both the prophet and the beneficiary, that’s when the rest of us have to stop watching the rocket and start reading the fine print.

If we’ve learned from Herbert at all, Mars should not be the stage where another singular savior proves his legend. It should be the stress test for whether we’re capable of a different kind of future-making: one that refuses manufactured prophecy, names power plainly, and insists that any leap away from Earth is accountable to the lives sealed inside the hull — not to the myth of the man who paid for the launch.