The Pirogue and the Tree
An open letter to Elon Musk
As a citizen of the world and as a father, I share your concerns for the future of our home planet, and therefore for my son and future generations. I agree with the necessity for our species not to stay confined on a single planet.
But I’m afraid that your solutions, despite all the good intentions you may have, could be lured into extremely harmfull purposes.
Article disponible en français :
If your intention is really to “[make] life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen”, then you should take some disturbing possibilities into account:
First, as Yuval Noah Harari said, you should never underestimate human stupidity. There are hints that the real masters of our world, I mean the few guys who own 90% of the economy, may be willing to leave all of us behind on a devastated Earth while trying to save their ass on another planet. So they wouldn’t lift a finger to help save our best chance to survive, which is still Earth, as far as we know.
If you are sincere, as I believe you are, the possibility that you may become the “usefull idiot” of such a stupid plan should scare you to death. If it doesn’t, as I know you like Sci-Fi, I suggest you read — or read again — Cyril M. Kornbluth’s short novel, The Marching Morons, and think about the last two sentences.
If you are not, and it’s just a marketing trick to sell us the strip-mining of the Moon and of the nearby space, be cursed.
Second, you may lack time. More and more people today are expecting a global collapse of our civilisation. Some of the experts of this topic think it could occur somewhere in the next two decades. Which would certainly be too short to achieve your goal. So you would need to prevent or at least delay a global collapse as much as possible.
Third, you may fail. Terraforming Mars or another planet, or even maintaining a closed colony on it has never been done. Despite all your efforts, it may still be beyond our reach, as suggested by a recent NASA study. You can’t know. So saving our mother planet is still prior to space expansion now.
Fourth, your success or, worse, your failure, may prevent us from what should still be our main goal: preserving life conditions on Earth, for humanity, and life in general. Space programs may divert a huge amount of resources that may be crucial to that purpose. Space fantasies may also divert humanity from taking care of their own home.
Fifth, Mars or other planets should never be seen as backup planets in case we destroy our one. Because it would be impossible to fly ten billions of people on another planet. Would it be possible, it wouldn’t be very useful anyway. If we don’t contain our demography, a new planet would be as full of humans — and probably as destroyed — as ours in a century. So an expansion plan could only mean establishing little colonies elsewhere, while maintaining most of humanity on Earth, which still implies preserving good life conditions here.
At that point, you may think I try to convince you to give up.
I don’t. I think what you try to do is important.
But you should consider this:
Terraforming Mars and, above all, “expanding life beyond our little blue mud ball” is not an engineering project, it’s a life project.
You’ll need all the ressources of Earth for it. Biological and human ones. So the first part of the project is to preserve life on our planet. Applying engineering approach to life led us to a disaster in agriculture and breeding. We should learn from this failure. You will need help from people with a more global approach, centered on life more than on technics.
Then you need to take the human factor into account. Saving humanity and its life conditions is a global project that needs to imply each and everyone of us. What drives people together is not only projects, it’s stories. We need a powerful narrative for that.
A melanesian myth, from Vanuatu, tells us that:
Every man is torn between two needs. The need of the Pirogue, that is to say of the journey, of the tearing away from oneself, and the need of the Tree, that is to say of the rooting, of the identity.
Men are constantly wandering between these two needs, sometimes yielding to one, sometimes to the other until the day when they understand that it is with the Tree that the Pirogue is made.
The newborn consciousness of humanity’s mortality leads to different pathways, according to those two needs.
Your narrative is a very powerful answer to the need of the Pirogue. You’ve been pretty good so far at building momentum and conquest spirit in the technologic part of our future’s narrative: when my thirteen-years-old son had to make a biography for homework, he chose to write about “Elon Musk, space pioneer”.
But you won’t be able to leave our island and put your foot on a new land if your Tree fades away. What narrative will feed the need of the Tree? Who will take care of it, while you’re away, so you may come back?
Others share a different story, answering the need of the Tree. All around the world, people start to organize the transition to a more sustainable society, building resilient communities, able to adapt to a now maybe unavoidable global collapse. One of the most representative of this movement may be Cyril Dion, spokesperson of the Hummingbirds movement and co-director, with Mélanie Laurent, of Tomorrow, a documentary which succeeded, throughout about thirty countries, in creating “a new collective fiction”. The film envisions a future where citizens could regain control on food, energy, economy, education and democracy. Cyril Dion insists on the necessity of a new narrative to drive people on a path to survival.
The question is not to oppose those narratives. The question is how to combine them into a greater one. As I wondered in a previous article: What story, what project could drive all humanity together, could give humanity purpose? What could be the purpose of humanity?
At the spatial scale, we are only tiny bacterias evolving on the surface of a thin layer of mold covering a little blue mud ball lost on the periphery of a galaxy. Yet, of all the living species of the Earth, we alone managed to tear ourselves away from the gravity of our world to cross the space vacuum.
We are an astroperegrine terrestrial species, we are the only one. Only we can allow earthly life to leave its cradle and begin to conquer space. I believe that we can be or choose to be vectors of life, spores seeding the stars. Why couldn’t we imagine ourselves as builders of living worlds, as gardeners of the galaxy? What higher mission to assign to all humanity?
I believe you already had a glimpse of that future. You said that “Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball — or go extinct.” I put to your credit that you said “expand life” instead of “expand humanity”.
Building on Mars a transplanted bubble of earthly life for a privileged few may be possible with the resources of a devastated Earth.
Seeding the stars won’t.
Indeed, to hope crossing the interstellar void one day, we will have to learn to (re)create and maintain ecosystems on Earth. How could we expect becoming gardeners of the galaxy if we are not even able to garden our own backyard? Conversely, the terraforming experience of extreme and isolated environments may be decisive in understanding how to repair destroyed ecosystems on Earth. To terraform planets, we will have to learn to manage cooperation of all life, and only on Earth can we learn that. And we will need all the biodiversity that the Earth can offer us. We will also need all the diversity of humanity, from transitioners to transhumanists.
Meet Cyril and others in need of the Tree. Talk to each oher. Help each other. Support each other. Share. You have so much to learn from each other. Be tough to each other, but listen to their critics and work harder to lift objections.
Above all, each of you must accept, by precautionary principle, the possibility to be wrong, and the other to be right. You can’t take the risk to lose humanity, and maybe all earthly life, just because of your willing to be right. You can’t afford to be ennemies. You have to pledge a public alliance.
If you take a stand with them, you may loose support from the main stream and from the stock exchange. But you’ll win better allies than your shareholders, better stimulation than from your competitors, because, contrary to all those, they won’t leave you alone with yours fears for the sake of humanity. You don’t need to work seventeen hours a day because you and only you understand what really matters. You are not alone.
It is up to us to make the choice of unity. It is up to you. Now.
Will your ego submit to the platry masters of this world, who wish you to waste your talent in building luxury lifeboats for them instead of building a real future for all humanity?
Or will you dare engaging in something bigger than yourself?
P.S. — I wrote another open letter to Cyril Dion to invite him also to join you. May the Pirogue and the Tree understand each other, and unite.
For the sake of all of us.
