Pete Tridish and pals made a hell of a Hallowe'en haunt this year: on their "porch of doom," trick-or-treaters were sent to a Mars colonized by billionaires where they were expected to mine Mars rocks and put them in Amazon Mars boxes at a sweatshop Amazon Mars warehouse; Pete notes that the haunt was partly inspired by my 2011 young adult novella Martian Chronicles, which was recently podcast in two parts by the excellent Escape Pod podcast!
Billionaires talk about going to Mars. They paint a picture of the utopia they will build there. But a utopia for billionaires is where we work as slaves in their labor camps. This years Halloween Porch of Doom gives you an opportunity to visit this glorious future of "progress," as defined by Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.Capitalism gives ridiculous rewards to people on top, and pays little to people who do the actual physical work. Entrepreneurs don't come up with ideas on their own… school, reading works of others, talking with peers, and the labor to bring it to reality. So how come one person gets to decide what to do with all the profit that the idea creates?
It was expensive when NASA built rockets, because as part of the government, their first priority was safety. Even so, space travel was dangerous. The biggest innovation by these entrepreneurs is cost cutting by tolerating more risk.
Billionaires must be taxed sensibly to give society a return on the investments in education, roads, social services and other things that made their businesses successful. Then that tax money could be poured into the schools and the space program and be done properly, with less megalomania. Let's use the money to fix the Earth first, before we go ruining another planet.
We'll get to Mars one day, but we don't need billionaires to do it.
