SpaceX's next-generation 'Starship' spacecraft takes off from the Boca Chica, Texas, launch pad on March 14.Joe Skipper (Reuters)
Elon Musk has not only created the Neuralink company to work on his transhumanist project. He has also founded SpaceX, whose history we know more or less because we periodically witness their launches of manned rockets into space on our screens. In the long term, for Musk, it is about getting man out of his natural terrestrial biotope and permanently installing him in an artificial extraterrestrial biotope. In this perspective, the Moon will become a built space station, a stage before longer flights to Mars. It will go from the status of a pile of American human garbage to that of a prelude to the American journey to Mars. Those who consider their objective foolish should read the astrophysicists who announce the death of the Sun within 4,000 million years, when its fuel has been exhausted; 4,000 million years is a lot, of course, but it is inevitable, and hence the certainty that life on Earth will be compromised much sooner and that men will disappear if by then they have not found a way to stop the bang.
The Sun is expected to dilate and its volume to multiply by two hundred. This expansion will cause the disappearance of Mercury and Venus. Before exploding, the Earth will no longer have water and life on its surface; it will no longer be more than a ball of rock in a state of fusion. The heart of the Sun will heat up to a hundred million degrees, this hot gas star will extend to the orbit of Mars: those who believe that taking refuge on the red planet would be a solution are only displacing the problem! The helium released by the Sun will also be depleted. The Sun's envelope will be ejected in the form of a nebula and will dissolve into interstellar space. Then the heart of the Sun will progressively dim, becoming a white dwarf that will cool for tens of billions of years before becoming a black dwarf. The Sun will die like 90% of the stars. For—essential banality and yet long forgotten—everything that is born lives and dies.
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The natural death of the Sun, which causes the death of the Earth in its existential journey, does not exclude other ways for our planet to die before that happens! If an astrophysicist explained that, taking into account what the science of life on Earth has taught us for millions of years, the heating and cooling cycles are primarily attributable to the magnetic activity of the heliosphere, that is, of the bubble gas formed by solar winds, he would be expelled from the international community of “scientists” as a climate skeptic, he would lose his position, his salary, the subsidies for his laboratory, his students, his possibility of supervising thesis, his reputation, and he would pay his audacity with social death. He will teach that global warming is essentially due to human activity, which allows the mythology of green capitalism to sell products that, although highly polluting, involve saving resources. This does not prevent the heliosphere that protects the internal solar system from being perforated and dangerous cosmic rays from passing through there, traveling almost as fast as light and bombarding the Earth, affecting its temperature and climate.
The planet can also disappear before its time due to (...) those racing cars launched at full speed into space, which could crash into the Earth's crust, destroying life and even pulverizing the blue planet, of which nothing would be left but floating dust. in the cosmos. A recent experiment, carried out on September 22, 2022 by NASA, sent a five-hundred-kilogram probe to crash into a small asteroid one hundred and sixty meters in diameter called Dimorphos, more than 11 million kilometers away, to deflect it. The operation was called Double Asteroid Redirection Test; In addition, the word
dart
in English means “dart.” The collision generated several tens of tons of dust and modified the asteroid's path. At the time of writing, at the beginning of October 2022, it is not known how much, it is still being calculated…
Probably, an asteroid 12 kilometers in diameter 66 million years ago collided with the Earth in a place that would correspond to the current Yucatán (Mexico) and caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs. This collision, followed by a considerable drop in the temperature of the planet, since the Sun was partly masked by the tons of dust that was released, later made possible the development of mammals, including man, who, if it were not for that could not have existed... Another asteroid... and man could cease to exist.
Elon Musk thinks in terms of very long duration, disorienting and disconcerting those who are already striving to project themselves into the ephemeral future of their own existence. To the extent that thinking in terms of millennia, as historians and philosophers worthy of the name do—Joachim of Fiore and Vico, Hegel and Spengler, Toynbee, Keyserling and Frobenius, Malraux, closer to us…—is a discipline that is rarely practiced, thinking in terms of the future of man in the however foreseen case of the disappearance of the planet Earth is a neglected exercise. Science fiction is the only one that occupies this terrain, philosophy ignores it.
Musk's project makes sense, that of transhumanism: considering the limited duration of man's life on Earth, he wants first of all to change man and attribute another biotope to him. Therefore, modify the human and expand it, increase it, sculpt your new man with transhumanism, whose armed arm is Neuralink. Then he intends to change the environment of man and find a replacement place for that humanoid. Hence the experiments of SpaceX, his other company, which designs intersideral space travel, trying to invent new fuels capable of solving the problem of the duration and speed of light-year journeys. (…)
The project to colonize Mars occupies NASA as much as it does Musk. The American space agency recruits volunteers for a one-year mission consisting of living at a base in Texas in the conditions of extraterrestrial life, in a 158 square meter space manufactured by 3D printing. Right now, the recruitment conditions are precise: first be American, then be in good health, not smoke, be over 30 but under 55, speak English, master engineering, mathematics, physics, biology and computer science. , have two years' professional experience in one of these fields or have a flight license of more than a thousand hours. Those chosen will carry out scientific research, become familiar with virtual reality, robotic controls and simulate trips to reconstituted space. It is about preparing a flight to Mars with a stop on the Moon transformed into a waiting room. There are already Russians, Europeans and Chinese who have participated.
When the time comes, this posthuman will likely take on digital souls loaded into human brains, perhaps cloned and in turn incorporated into exoskeletons. Why else work in all these directions? Men will live a virtual life in a hostile universe. And these lives, of some chosen by others more chosen than them, will be linked—but by who?—to a total matrix that will pilot the whole. But to do what? Malraux said: “What's the point of conquering the Moon if it's to commit suicide there?” Today, devoid of souls, who tells us that the headless men we have become are not already dead?
Michel Onfray
is a philosopher. This excerpt is a preview of his book
De el Ánima de el. The life and death of the soul
, by Paidós, which is published this April 10.
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