At 35, Steven Bartlett has the online world at his feet. African-born, English-raised son of a Nigerian mother and an English father, he describes himself as an entrepreneur, a speaker, an investor, an innovator, a disruptor, and a “happy sexy millionaire”.
Bartlett’s considerable wealth is based on a string of online successes in media, investment, production, marketing and retail. Since 2017 he has hosted a highly popular podcast, The Diary of a CEO, and early this year had as his guest another man of African descent, New York born Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Tyson is a very smart man, but he’s not a CEO. Unlike Bartlett and a host of even richer tech entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, he didn’t become famous by making squillions online. He earned his stripes in academia, studying astrophysics at the feet of scholars and thinkers like his hero Carl Sagan.
This moment in Bartlett’s interview with Tyson stuck with me. “What do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime?” asked Bartlett. He hadn’t even finished the question when Tyson talked over him: “Zero.” Then again, to make the point: “Zero.”
“Really?” asked Bartlett, clearly surprised and disappointed. Tyson, who doesn’t confine his reading to scientific literature, went on to explain that “we only do big expensive things if there’s a geopolitical reason for it”, driven by economic or defence motives.
He talked about the Apollo moon program of the 1960s, starting with the Russians sending Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit in 1961. President John Kennedy’s response to that was to demand Congressional funding, as Tyson put it, “to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny.” Apollo was “a battlecry against communism [and] the godless Russians”.
“No one ever spent scads of money just because it was a cool thing to do,” said Tyson. “That has never happened, ever.” During the Apollo program, NASA people began talking about getting to Mars by 1985, but during the moon landings from 1969, “we looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren’t there [so] we canned … Apollo.”
NASA focused on near-Earth exploration. Then in 2018 China announced plans to put astronauts on the moon, a brazen challenge to America’s moon monopoly that demanded a response. Hence Artemis, and another space race was born.
In the American frontier spirit, NASA isn’t stopping there. “The first crewed Artemis flight marks a key step toward long‑term return to the Moon and future missions to Mars”, it says on its website, envisioning a Mars landing “as early as the 2030s”.
The idea of Earthlings even reaching the red planet, let alone living there, is hard to accept. Mars at its closest is over 130 times more distant than the moon; at its most distant that blows out to over 1000 times. A spaceship can get to the moon and back in a week; a Mars return flight would involve years of travel.
Earth is a dominant feature in the windows of lunar ships, but no amount of training could prepare travellers to Mars for the psychological impact, month after month, of seeing their home steadily diminishing to a barely-visible speck.
As for conversations with Earth, forget it. Radio signals take just 2.5 seconds to pass between Earth and the moon – a manageable response time in an emergency. By contrast, a signal to Mars takes at best three minutes and more likely something like 15 minutes. A single two-way communication (“How are you?” “Fine thanks.”) can take over 40 minutes. In Mars space, you’re on your own.
This is to set aside all manner of other lethal threats to extraterrestrial humanity in the realms of physics (radiation, gravity, temperature, atmosophere) and human biology. Stepping on to the moon and leaving soon after is one thing; living there is something entirely different. And Mars? Let’s not go there.
NASA – like the Chinese, no doubt – nurtures ideas about mining water or using robots ahead of time to build settlements before plundering mineral resources. Musk, Bezos and others like them are funding elaborate plans to enable a select few to leave Earth behind them for good. Not exploring, but colonising.
The pioneering climate scientist James Hansen began his career studying the deadly atmosphere of Venus for NASA. When he saw Earth heading in the direction of that hellhole, he turned his attention to the only home humanity has ever known. One with a protective magnetic shield, breathable air and gravity we evolved with.
Amid our Earthly turmoil we can’t even dispose of soft plastic let alone stop our climate going rogue, but like those colonisers of old we’re seeking escape hatches, new worlds to plunder, at colossal expense. It seemed exciting in the 1960s; today it’s grotesque.