Mars or Bust
"Why bother yourself with the bottleneck at Hormuz?"
Dominance hierarchies, however magnificent in the open savanna or penthouse office, do not translate well to the confined ecosystem of a federal courthouse.
Recently, in just such a space in downtown Oakland, two specimens of Homo economicus var. techno-messianic, the ultra-high-net-worth variety prone to displays of dominance, were brought before a jurist of the old-growth legal tradition rooted deeply in bedrock law, to sort out who had swindled whom in the founding of a company for the construction of intelligent idols for worship purposes.
The company on trial, so to speak, was OpenAI. The dispute was elemental: one alpha Homo had donated roughly $38 million to what he understood to be a nonprofit sanctuary for beneficial intelligence, only to discover that his co-founders had, while he was busy acquiring social media platforms and naming children after alphanumeric sequences, quietly converted said sanctuary into a for-profit enterprise now valued at approximately one trillion dollars, excluding him from any control or even a minor stake. In nature, we call this nest parasitism. In Silicon Valley, they call it a pivot.
The aggrieved donor — let us refer to him simply as Subject A, the world’s first trillionaire, a man who has staked his legacy on the proposition that our species’ salvation lies in abandoning the only planet evolution ever bothered to make habitable for us — arrived in court with what naturalists might charitably describe as a compromised threat display. His Hollywood entertainment lawyer, it should be noted, dressed as though auditioning for a 1980s new wave revival. The suits look like David Byrne’s from the Psycho Killer era, but perhaps Devo spacesuits would have been more appropriate.
The presiding jurist, a creature of considerably more refined temperament, was observed admonishing Subject A for broadcasting commentary about the proceedings to his own social media habitat, where volume is mistaken for evidence and the upraised thumb functions as a substitute for reasoned argument. “Can we get things done,” she inquired with the patience of someone who has watched this species for a very long time, “without you making things worse outside the courtroom?”
She also found it necessary, at a later juncture, to redirect Subject A away from his preferred topic of AI robot armies exterminating the human race. One sympathizes. It is difficult to stay on task when the extinction of your species feels so personally relevant.
Meanwhile, a defending co-founder, cornered into the witness box, described a scene of Subject A rising from a conference room table in a state of considerable agitation — standing, circling, looming in that characteristic way of large primates who have not yet learned that perceived threat is rarely improved by proximity. “Something just shifted in him,” the witness observed. “He stood up and stormed around the table … I thought he was going to hit me.” The behavioral literature on this sort of display is extensive.
Under oath — a ritual the legal ecosystem developed specifically because the species cannot otherwise be relied upon — Subject A was compelled to admit that his proposed use for a $134-to-$150-billion stake in OpenAI was as leverage for loans to build a city on Mars.
Let us pause here, as an observant naturalist such as Sir David Attenborough would, to examine the habitat in question. Not the Oakland courtroom—Mars.
Mars receives roughly half the solar energy of Earth and offers, in exchange, an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide at less than one percent of Earth’s pressure, which is to say, standing unprotected on its surface would not merely be fatal but would be demonstrably theatrical. Nuclear scientists term these sorts of events “energetic disassembly.”
On top of that, and under, the soil is laced with perchlorates, lethal to mammalian biology. Cosmic radiation arrives unimpeded by any meaningful magnetic field. The temperature on a balmy afternoon approaches freezing and retreats, by nightfall, to minus ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit. The gravity, insufficient to maintain the bone density of organisms shaped by four billion years of terrestrial selection at 1.0 atmospheres, would render any children born there permanent exiles from their evolutionary origin site.
Humans will not colonize Mars. Biophysics has not authorized it. Robots might, assuming a novel energy source is found in time.
What the biosphere has authorized, through its long and largely thankless labor, is our blue planet — a place where liquid water falls from the sky, where earthworms and fungi generate food without perchlorates, where the air pressure is agreeable to lung tissue, and where the temperature range, at least historically, has been compatible with the continuation of complex mammalian life.
Subject A would like to leave it. I say Bon Voyage! A jury of his peers will now determine what he is owed for the privilege. The machine intelligence on trial will, in all likelihood, be the last technology this civilization gets before it either transcends its limitations or confirms them.
How do you discern truth? That historical quandary was how we arrived at jury trials. That is how we got to witnesses, rules of evidence, and standards for authenticated proof. Casting bones didn’t really do it for us. Searching for truth, in the hands of a competent judge, is a scientific method—with an exacting methodology.
If you contrast law with the way Silicon Valley operates, or most of the MAGA, Woke, or Cancel Culture, a more popular course might be to immerse the witch in water. Start with a presumption of guilt and work backward from there until you fill in a pattern of misconduct you can lynch someone with. Generate thousands or millions of upraised blue thumbs and flaming replies. Volume equals proof. This was the course Subject A was relying upon—(1) stimulate the fight or flight response in the amygdala and (2) stand back and wait for the flash mob.
The judge, for her part, was not moved by talk of AI robot armies wiping out the human race. “We are not going to talk much about extinction in this case,” she said. “They got it, that’s enough. I suspect that there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands … But we’re not going to get into that.”
Perhaps Sir David would find this, of all things, the most hopeful detail in the record.
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| IDF practice range, occupied Southern Lebanon. Israel is now talking about a “Gaza model” for its ongoing conflict there. © Walking Archive |
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