Elon Musk, Carl Sagan, and the Fate of Humanity

The tycoon’s plans to colonize the Red Planet follow the ultimate goal of “longtermism”: saving the human species from itself. The great scientist and science communicator once said something similar, though with significant differences

BY EMILIO COZZI e MATTEO MARINI

The purpose, ultimately, is the salvation of Humanity.
Elon Musk has never hidden this, taking on the role of a space prophet of “longtermism,” that current of thought (or philosophy, or religion, call it what you will) that does not aim at the good of a single individual, nor at pleasing some deity; even actions or ventures that may appear to bring no immediate benefit must be directed toward the achievement of the ultimate good.
Because, according to Musk, humankind is destined to self destruct (not an assumption without foundation), and for this reason it is necessary to have a plan B, specifically, a “Planet B”: Mars.

From reading Walter Isaacson’s long and dense book Elon Musk, published a couple of years ago, it becomes clear how this idea runs like a refrain through the life of the space billionaire: Musk does everything possible to acquire the means and technologies capable of bringing Humanity to colonize the Red Planet and establish a new civilization there, leaving behind a burning home. Burning because of climate change (which Musk has never denied, unlike many Republicans, Donald Trump included) and above all because of the consequences of a possible nuclear war. Unfortunately, in recent years, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this specter has grown ever more threatening.

Fleeing from the nuclear apocalypse

A little over a year ago, in a speech delivered on a stage before SpaceX employees with the Starships in the background, Musk proclaimed his prophecy: “If something destroys Earth, for example a third thermonuclear world war, it will be because, most likely, they’ll launch some nuclear warhead at the Moon. It would be much harder, instead, to shoot a nuclear missile at Mars and, should it happen, you would see it coming and have some time to stop it; the difficulty, or the distance and time required to reach Mars, actually has an insulating advantage for the continuation of consciousness, even if something terrible were to happen on Earth.”

On May 27, 2025, with a new speech at Starbase, Musk outlined the most recent developments—in other words, the updated plan toward Mars. The event was titled “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary,” another solid refrain that the magnate has repeated since he entered the extraterrestrial business.
He said that the first Martian mission could depart as early as the end of 2026 and arrive on the Red Planet in 2027. Without a human crew, but, he added, “it would be epic to see Optimus wandering around on the surface of Mars.”

Optimus is the humanoid robot Tesla is developing, which recently showed impressive skills as a dancer and butler. It is an example of how all of Musk’s endeavors are geared toward the conquest of another planet.
The same goes for Starlink, which is both the financial fuel for the enterprise and the model for a future infrastructure “to provide internet on Mars”; or Tesla’s autonomous navigation, to interpret and explore the landscape; and of course Starship, which although it will be used to deliver satellites into Earth orbit and reach the Moon, was conceived to transport human crews and equipment to that “new world” that Musk dreams of colonizing.

On this point, the entrepreneur said: “It’s a provisional plan in which we hope to increase the cadence of flights to Mars with each launch window, so about every two years […] eventually we’ll try to reach one or two thousand ships per rendezvous […] these are just guesses, but we need to bring about a million tons to the surface of Mars in order to make a civilization self-sustaining and reach that critical point where, if supply ships from Earth stop arriving for any reason, Mars can still thrive.”

Millions of tons, thousands of spaceships

What is needed to establish the core of what will become a Martian civilization? Habitation structures, supplies, vehicles, survival devices, and an umbilical connection to our home planet, which initially should provide the resources to endure on a world without breathable atmosphere, without water, and without a magnetic field to shield against radiation. “My estimate is that it will take about a million tons, but it could be 10 million. I hope it is not 100 million, that would be an enormous amount. The leading candidate right now is the Arcadia region.” Not too close to the poles, but near ice to have access to water. “The choice narrows to a smaller region, so Arcadia is one of my names. My daughter is also named Arcadia, and it is one of the options,” the tycoon said.

Musk claims he could produce up to three Starships per day at Starbase in Texas, and at another facility under construction in Florida, reaching a thousand spaceships per year, ready to launch with thousands of people and hundreds of tons on board two thousand ships every time the launch window opens. Earth and Mars align every 26 months.
This, he admits, assumes everything goes smoothly and Starship is ready for the mission. Despite SpaceX’s unmatched track record, this is at least a scenario one could reasonably doubt.
At that point, to make things simpler and pave the way for the new civilization, Musk does not rule out terraforming Mars with nuclear bombs.

In the Footsteps of Sagan. Almost.

“Because in the long term every planetary civilization will be threatened by impacts from space, any surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring. Not for exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason one can imagine: to stay alive. If our long term survival is at stake, we have a fundamental responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.”

This time the words are not Elon Musk’s, but Carl Sagan’s. On page 36 of his Pale Blue Dot, the great scientist and popularizer refers to the possible impact of a massive object, such as an asteroid or a comet, that could threaten life on our Planet.
It has happened in the past (the dinosaurs and a large portion of living species paid the price) and it will happen again in the future. Our ability to deflect an approaching celestial body, however, is becoming real today, and soon we may be able to defend ourselves with specialized space missions.

Sagan, although in a different context, also reflects on another point: the search for an extraterrestrial civilization, carried out by listening (in this case with radiotelescopes) to see if anyone is trying to communicate: “The most probable case is that the message comes from a civilization with much higher technology. In this way, even before decoding such a message, we will have acquired invaluable knowledge: that it is possible to avoid the dangers of the technological adolescence we are going through. The existence of a single message from space will demonstrate that surviving technological adolescence is possible: the civilization transmitting the message, after all, has survived.”

That “technological adolescence” is nothing else, according to Sagan, than our current phase. Thanks to technological progress we have improved our lives, but at the same time we have built the potential tool for self annihilation, after the discovery of nuclear energy and the invention of the atomic bomb.

The Loss of Humanism

It is from this point onward that “longtermism” departs from the path traced by Sagan. From here the charm of exploration and discovery is lost, as is the sense of science and technology as tools for investigating and understanding the Universe and its dynamics. From here, too, Humanism is lost, the tradition that for centuries has ennobled the effort to question and understand the world.

Sagan helped send probes to study the outer Solar System, vehicles carrying plaques and discs engraved with messages for extraterrestrials. He turned Voyager 1 to photograph Earth, simply to show everyone the vision of our “pale blue dot,” a speck of dust suspended in the infinite.

The latest decisions by the White House, which has “divorced” from Musk but whose path had been laid by the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, seem to point in a different direction. They have canceled or refused to fund some of the scientific exploration programs that aimed at the essence of knowledge itself: the drive to know if we are alone or to better understand the fabric of spacetime.

Three missions were dedicated to analyzing and searching for possible traces of past and present life on Mars. Mars Sample Return, which has become, it must be noted, too costly and protracted, even according to the previous administration, although a low-cost solution was still being sought. ExoMars, with the Rosalind Franklin rover, a European program to look for biological evidence in the Martian subsurface. And Lisa, another joint mission to detect gravitational waves with two satellites in space.

The Trump administration intended to shut down satellites observing and studying Mars from orbit, Odyssey and Maven, halt expeditions to Venus, abandon Juno at Jupiter, and New Horizons at the edges of the Solar System among the Kuiper Belt objects.

In doing so, the remaining effort transforms into the glorification of technology as a display of power and geopolitical supremacy, as it was sixty years ago during the race to the Moon, in which “we must return before the Chinese land,” or even as a tool for salvation in a dark and distant future, like a Moses guiding his people to the promised land. At the same time, satellite missions that would have helped investigate climate chaos, the real problem ignored in the last century and impacting this one, are discarded.

Sagan never intended to abandon Earth and its inhabitants to a nuclear winter. He offered a powerful reflection on the case in which, after thorough research, we might conclude that no one out there is trying to contact us. “Such a discovery will highlight, perhaps more than anything else, our responsibilities to future generations. Because the most probable explanation for negative results, after an exhaustive and well-funded search, is that societies destroy themselves before becoming advanced enough to establish a high-power radio transmission service.”

This is what Musk fears. That is why he expresses the urgency of finding another world to transfer our civilization to. Sagan, however, sought a message of hope. He did not contemplate abandoning our “cradle.”
“The organization of a search for interstellar radio messages, regardless of the outcome, can have a cohesive and constructive influence on the entire human condition.” This means solving the problems we have here on Earth without looking for solutions elsewhere.