Foundation or Empire? How Elon Musk get Isaac Asimov wrong
In 2018, SpaceX achieved one of the most striking marketing stunts in recent times by sending a Tesla Roadster into space. It was a feat that might have seemed technically impossible for any private corporation to achieve just 10 years before. Beyond being a clever marketing stunt, the episode was also a milestone in the increasing commercialisation of space exploration.
Considering that, in the second half of the past century, participation in the Space Race was limited to the most powerful nations on the planet, it is a remarkable sign of the times we live in that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and, of course, Elon Musk’s SpaceX are now on the leading edge of space exploration. There can be no doubt that these new ‘space billionaires’ are influencing public discourse around humanity’s cosmic future, which in turn impacts the way we think of the future of our planet and our species. Undoubtedly, they hold the power to affect the development of both.
This is perhaps particularly true for Elon Musk, who was recently crowned richest man on Earth. Not only has his company achieved the best (and, dare I say, loudest) results in private space exploration yet, but he has also been quite vocal about his vision for the future of the human race as a multi-planetary species. Musk himself claims that his plans for SpaceX are inspired by ideas from science fiction, particularly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation saga, a copy of which is contained in the space-cruising Tesla Roadster. In 2017, Musk told Rolling Stone: ‘The lesson I drew from [the Foundation saga] is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one’.
But can the commercialisation of space exploration benefit civilisation in the way Asimov had envisioned?
The Foundation saga is generally regarded as one of the pinnacles of sci-fi literature. Originally a trilogy written by Asimov in the 1950s, in later years, the prolific author expanded it with two sequels and two prequels. The novels revolve around the plan devised by Hari Seldon, a scientist who predicts the inevitable collapse of the galactic empire he lives in and that has existed for thousands of years. He therefore gives instructions to set up a new colony, the Foundation, which is supposed to be the seed from which a new galactic empire blossoms much faster than it would have otherwise, hence drastically shortening the chaotic interregnum period.
In the Foundation universe, Hari Seldon becomes an almost mythical character; a quasi-prophetic figure appearing in the form of a hologram every so many decades or centuries throughout the history of the Foundation to guide its inhabitants in their difficult journey.
But Seldon was not a narcissist or a glory-seeking megalomaniac. In the second prequel, Forward the Foundation, the fictional scientist is depicted in all his humanity as a fragile yet resilient man who perseveres in his mission until the end, despite the world around him falling apart and his own personal tragedies.
This is not to say that Asimov wanted to promote martyrdom as a way to save civilisation, but rather that he firmly believed in putting the common good of the human race before any personal or parochial interest. As President of the American Humanist Association, he gave a speech in 1989 in which he outlined this vision very clearly. In short, Asimov envisioned a future in which all the nations of the world put differences aside and work together to place solar panels in space that could beam the energy of the Sun down to Earth. This would not only give humanity clean energy forever, but would also force long-lasting international peace and stability, since this infrastructure would be so challenging to build and maintain and so beneficial to have that no one would dare to risk or jeopardise it.
Sure, this plan has more than a few weak spots and is overall quite unrealistic. However, the main point to take from it is that Asimov not only imagined the technical aspect of what our next steps in space could be, but he tied the technical and the social together by articulating on their mutual influence and on why we, as a society, would want to strive for this scenario.
This is very important because a socio-technical view of space exploration is sorely missing in the current discourse around it. Over the past decades, we have internalised to a concerning extent the idea that the common good can be pursued through the business activity of seemingly benevolent billionaires, and that technical progress equals social progress. But these are dangerous concepts, and SpaceX proves it in two ways.
In 2020, as SpaceX was achieving some of its best results thus far, the US found itself dealing with the largest wave of anti-racism protests in decades. Many were struck by the sharp contrast between magnificent technical progress and concerning social unrest, apparently so alien to each other, but I argue that they are two faces of the same coin. This is because one should never forget that racial inequality is always also a matter of class inequality, and that the same system that chains so many people (disproportionately of colour) to ever more precarious economic conditions is also the very system that allows a handful of (white) individuals to accumulate such wealth that they can have their own space programmes and play their own version of the space race.
Furthermore, as Asimov had perfectly understood and as the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been telling us for 40 years now, the technical is always also political in that it strongly encourages those social relations and dynamics that are needed for its specific configuration to function while it discourages other agendas and value systems.
What this means is that the more we think of space as a commercial frontier and we accept the idea that billionaires are in a legitimate position to influence both the discourses and the technologies of space exploration, the more we allow these technologies to become the crystallised expression of a techno-scientific enterprise guided by an inequality-based entrepreneurial leadership. This is a big deal because it means that these material structures will reinforce and reproduce the values and power relations they originate from, making it increasingly harder to deviate from them.
Therefore, as much as I sympathise with the wish to expand our horizons, I think it is important to highlight that, no matter how many copies of Foundation Elon Musk shoots into space, he is not Hari Seldon, and not all space exploration is born equal. Most importantly, we have to remember that our world is not doomed yet and that comparing it with the irrecoverable galactic empire of Asimov’s novels entails a dangerous escapist feeling that belongs more to the dystopia of movies like Elysium, in which the rich leave everyone else behind and build a space neighbourhood for themselves, rather than to the just and inclusive spirit of Asimov’s vision.
Allowing billionaires to hijack sci-fi narratives would strip them of their incredibly powerful and insightful idealism and turn them into vague ideological smokescreens to mask the harsh truth of a collapsing empire that could reform itself, but instead chooses to project its flaws and injustices into space. This is a missed opportunity and a waste of imagination that we should not allow.
Let us then reclaim the powerful idealism that is at the core of Asimov’s work and of so much other science fiction and use it to imagine our own Foundation; our own way to use space exploration as a fair way to fix our world for everybody.
