The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?

Have you ever faced a truth that challenged something you held dearly? Have you ever caught sight of perfection then had it slip away?

It feels like this is happening a lot lately, and for me, the nail in the coffin was a book I read that made me re-think my long held, almost character defining opinions.

The book has a long title: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought this Through? It’s written by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith.

Ray Bradbury once said, “Earth is but our birthplace. It need not be our home forever.” That idea, that Earth is a nest for younglings, that a mature species would go find another nest, is fundamental to much of my worldview.

This book shows how holding that view has led to an unapologetic raping of the Earth.

There’s an idea, often expressed by Elon Musk, that we need to have humans elsewhere just so we can survive a planet-wide catastrophe.

This book dismantles this idea but first showing that it’s almost impossible to have a colony anywhere – low Earth orbit, the Moon, or Mars that can survive without resupplies from Earth.

So, we can’t make an escape pod to protect us from Earth’s collapse. Instead, we need to spend the money here, on the planet, to ensure it doesn’t happen.

I need to confess that I was once a big Elon Musk fan. This was the man who was mass marketing electric cars, reusable spaceships, worldwide internet, and solar powered roof tiles. I’d just finished 5 years working for educational charities in parts of Africa. I could see a synthesis of his projects that would benefit humanity greatly. His starlink, powered by his tiles, could bring modern education tools to the most remote corners of the world.

Now, well, my thoughts on him have evolved, I see a different, much meaner and less competent person. Yes, these projects all still exist, and could, theoretically, still make the solutions I glimpsed.

But this book opened my eyes to the surety that they won’t happen. The book went on in great length about Elon’s plans for a colony on Mars. It went through all of the logistical, medical and environmental reasons why his ideas are almost impossible.

Then it posed a question. Would you want to live in a world where he made all the rules? This is the man who’s personal AI, Grok, allegedly makes child porn. This is the man who Nazi salutes Donald Trump. This is the man who killed USAID, condemning thousands to suffer and possibly die needlessly.

Is this your king? If this is who we have to be to get to where I always thought we could go, do I still want to go?

And yet so much of my core optimism regarding humanity is that we can grow, expand, live out there, build a better world. I guess I was very heavily influenced by Star Trek as a kid. And not only that. I did grow up with that future-optimism, but I also grew up with an explosion of technology: Mobile phones didn’t exist, and when they first arrived, they were huge, looking like military radios; Personal computers didn’t exist, and when they arrived, they had amber-tint monitors and 300 baud modems; The internet, when it arrived in the mid-1980s, was text only, and disjointed. Ah, but what they’d be in the future! Powerful, useful, promising only upsides. As a popular song at the time sang, “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

The book’s conclusion is pretty simple. It’s almost possible to go, and may be in the not-too-near future, but at a much greater cost and danger than the cost and danger of just staying and fixing all the problems.

I wrote a very short review of the book just over a year ago. In the review, I said, “I can’t stop thinking about it.” That’s still true.

It shattered my illusions and made me question my hopes for humanity.

And I can’t stop thinking about it.