In addition to being a renowned astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse (New York, 1958) is a well-known science communicator. True to the best American school's playbook, one of his main skills is to bring down complex scientific concepts to an understandable level. Normally, deGrasse, host of a YouTube channel called StarTalk (5.3 million subscribers), delves into the solar system, black holes, and the universe, but lately, he has also targeted the elite of Silicon Valley to expose some of their fantasies.
Without mincing words, deGrasse points to Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), who claims that by 2050, he will be able to establish a colony on Mars populated by a million people. Musk argues that this adventure makes sense since Earth could be destroyed by the impact of an asteroid or a nuclear war. With physics, biology, and logistics ahead, several problems are posed that the New Yorker considers insurmountable no matter how much the big tech billionaires cling to the invincible innovation elixir.
On our planet, cosmic radiation is kept under control thanks to two factors: the magnetic field and the atmosphere. Neither of these two cushions exists on Mars, so the exposure to radiation for an individual on the surface of the Red Planet is the same as that suffered by an astronaut in deep space or equivalent to undergoing daily X-ray tests for years. The consequence: guaranteed cancer for the colonist and their potential offspring.
Furthermore, without an atmosphere, there is no air to breathe, and the atmospheric pressure is so low that, without a specific suit, blood would literally boil like good olive oil in a pan. To complete this hellish picture, the Martian soil is highly toxic, so a scene like the one proposed in The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015), where the intrepid explorer grows potatoes, confirms the movie's classification as science fiction.
DeGrasse dissects the transportation issue by applying basic arithmetic notions. "The largest rocket currently in development is SpaceX Starship and is designed to carry up to Mars (being very optimistic) a hundred people. A million colonists divided by 100 passengers per launch equals 10,000 takeoffs from Earth in 25 years. That's 400 per year or more than one daily. Each launch requires months of preparation, perfect weather conditions, and sufficient fuel. We are talking about the most complex, expensive, and risky mission in human history, and Silicon Valley thinks we can turn it into some kind of daily bus route."
The second technological epic is written on the back of artificial intelligence. In this episode, the astrophysicist mentions Ray Kurzweil (Google's director of engineering) and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the father of ChatGPT, and a deep adversary of Musk, with whom he shares some delusions. According to Kurzweil, Moore's Law guarantees that by 2045, the peak of general artificial intelligence will be reached, meaning computers' ability to achieve consciousness. But Moore's Law, deGrasse counters, "is not a physical law but a business decision that semiconductor companies made to remain competitive. And it is beginning to crack. We cannot manufacture silicon transistors smaller than an individual atom, which means that the exponential growth of processing power is coming to an end."
Even if the aforementioned law maintained its theoretical pace and computational brain doubled its abilities every x years, "processing power is not the same as intelligence. If they were synonymous, today's existing supercomputers would already be conscious due to their brutal computing power, but they cannot understand what they calculate or why they calculate it."
Kurzweil's chimera links with Altman's, convinced that it will be possible to record a human consciousness on a hard drive so that, as in Chappie (Neill Blomkamp, 2015), the mind avoids the body's miseries, and immortality becomes a reality. "Consciousness is not software running on biological hardware. You cannot copy and paste your mind into a computer. Your thoughts, memories, and subjective experiences emerge from the specific physical structure of your brain. Even if we could scan every neuron in the human brain (something unthinkable today), the result would not be eternal life stored in a computer. It would be a very detailed simulation of you, but it wouldn't be you," deGrasse assures.
As an epilogue, the astrophysicist offers a more than reasonable reflection. What if, instead of investing billions in these insane companies, the Silicon Valley hawks focused their efforts on combating climate change with the known remedies that exist (renewable energies, greater energy efficiency, better batteries, and different consumption habits)?