In a recent post on X, Elon Musk said: A dire warningStarship, the largest of SpaceX's spacecraft, “will spread life to multiple planets and protect life from extinction on Earth, as long as we don't let bureaucracy get in the way,” he wrote.
“Government regulations get stricter every year. If this continues, all large projects in the United States will be illegal,” he wrote, pointing to California's cursed high-speed rail waste as a classic lesson.
“The Office of Government Efficiency is the only way to extend life beyond Earth,” he concluded, referring to the agency Musk himself will head in the second Trump administration (not coincidentally named DOGE), tasked with cutting Washington's Borg-like hordes of managers and bureaucrats.
This wouldn't be the first time that the road to hell has been paved with good intentions: the more powerful the tools, the grander the intentions, the more arrogant the depravity.
Musk's message is a silver lining to many in an increasingly dark time. Today's bureaucrats aren't just stifling the major infrastructure and transportation projects that marked America's postwar golden age. They are more broadly robbing America of its cultural and commercial lifeblood. They are enforcing censorship, degrading the food supply, inflating savings, eroding the rule of law, and tightening the screws on social and financial oversight. They are becoming the only government agency with powers that eclipse all other government agencies.
Musk has explicitly advocated for natalism, growth, and libertarianism in opposition to an agenda that would destroy family formation, childbirth, land ownership, homeownership, and physical and mental health — all elements of how we imagine life on Mars might be once Starship actually starts ferrying settlers to the Red Planet.
However, with dystopian technologies becoming more and more widespread, and many engineers actively working on building super-intelligent machines and planetary computers, if life is to spread beyond Earth, human Life is not going to be quickly left behind and replaced by a horde of cyborgs like those that have become the archetype villains in the Star Trek universe, or like the bureaucrats back home are becoming themselves.
Many leading futurists marvel at the opening of the stars to the light of consciousness, but it is easy to imagine how this could lead to Mars becoming the center of a communist colony, wanting only to merge with each other and with their super-smart machines (not just giant underground computers, but drone swarms, nanobots, virtual demigods, and so on). Our technologically hybrid age, in which leading visionaries want to fuse the cult of human imagination with the cult of machine memory into a universal New Age religion, puts Americans at shocking risk of being mutated into a psychic version of the Soviet ideal of the “neo-Soviet man,” a superhuman being who is both master and servant of the machines.
We also have to deal with the “inadvertent” element. The Mars colonists may in theory seem dedicated to increasing the population of flesh-and-blood humans in the universe, but over time they may realize that they have innocently or foolishly done something that will lead to the continued domination of “mere” humans who are born, live, and die the way they were given to us from the beginning, or to the subjugation of the planet by intelligences unfriendly or disrespectful to existence. It wouldn't be the first time that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. The more powerful the tools, the grander the intentions, and the greater the pride, the harder they will fall.
Some will argue that the situation on Earth and in America today is so bad that we must break free from the clutches of bureaucrats and worry about the rest later. This may be true, or it may be debatable or simply wrong, but it may be at least understandable. But if that is so, then while some of us work furiously to break free, others must focus on what is truly enduring: testifying to the precious and divine character of our given humanity and warning, in accordance with the traditions of the righteous prophets, that the quickest and surest way to lose that character is to turn away from God.
