Mr. Musk, Before We Colonize Mars, May I Ask One Very Human Question?

Will the end of scarcity also mean the end of desire?

"The solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself. Mystery belongs to the supernatural and the divine; the solution belongs to sleight of hand." — Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

By Glênio S Guedes (brazilian lawyer)

Most people look at Mars and see a planet.

Elon Musk looks at it and sees humanity's next destination.

I look at it and see a question.

It is difficult not to admire someone who has repeatedly transformed what once seemed impossible into engineering reality. Electric vehicles have reshaped an industry. Reusable rockets have rewritten the economics of spaceflight. Artificial intelligence is redefining the relationship between human labor and machines. Mars itself has begun to feel less like science fiction than a long-term engineering objective.

For that reason alone, Musk's vision deserves serious attention.

In his recent interview with The Economist, he sketches a future in which artificial intelligence and robotics generate such extraordinary abundance that human labor becomes largely optional and money itself loses much of its significance.

Should that vision materialize, it would rank among humanity's greatest technological achievements.

Yet before we begin building cities on another planet, I would like to ask one very human question.

Will the end of scarcity also mean the end of desire?

It may seem a modest question beside the prospect of colonizing Mars.

I suspect it is also the older one.

Let us assume, for a moment, that Musk is entirely right.

Machines produce virtually everything worth producing.

Material scarcity becomes the exception rather than the rule.

Work is no longer an economic necessity.

Humanity wins a struggle that has accompanied it since the beginning of civilization.

Then what?

What follows abundance?

Will desire simply fade away?

Or will it quietly reinvent itself?

Perhaps we are confusing two very different things.

Needs have natural limits.

Hunger ends.

Thirst ends.

Cold ends.

Desire does not appear to work that way.

Every fulfilled ambition quietly gives rise to another.

Every solution opens the door to a new question.

We live longer.

We know more.

We produce more.

We are more connected than any generation before us.

Yet material progress has not silenced some of our oldest afflictions. Anxiety, depression, loneliness and the search for meaning remain stubborn companions of modern life.

This is not an argument against technology.

Nor is it evidence that innovation has somehow failed.

Quite the opposite.

Technology has relieved suffering on a scale unparalleled in history.

But its extraordinary success may also remind us that not every form of suffering belongs to the same category.

Some problems yield to better tools.

Others seem to travel with us wherever we go.

Perhaps the decisive question has never been how much we can produce.

Perhaps it has always been why we produce at all.

Engineering excels at answering one question:

How?

It calculates.

Designs.

Builds.

Solves.

Civilization, however, has always depended just as much on another question.

Why?

Once every practical problem has been solved, what shall we do with the solution?

Suppose a robot becomes a better cook than any chef.

Someone will still want to prepare dinner for the person they love.

Suppose artificial intelligence writes flawless novels.

Someone will still feel compelled to write an imperfect one.

Suppose work is no longer necessary for survival.

People may still seek to create, to contribute, to belong, or simply to give meaning to their days.

Because not everything we do is born of necessity.

Much of what makes us human is born of desire.

This, perhaps, is the one place where Musk's extraordinary vision becomes intriguingly silent.

It tells us a great deal about the future of machines.

It has much less to say about the future of human beings.

That is hardly a criticism.

It may simply reflect the proper limits of engineering.

Engineering can build the bridge.

It cannot tell us why we should cross it.

It can build the rocket.

It cannot determine the purpose of the journey.

It can create extraordinary tools.

The meaning we assign to them remains unmistakably human.

Colonizing Mars may become one of history's greatest achievements.

I sincerely hope it does.

My only concern is that we will bring ourselves along.

The spacecraft may leave Earth behind.

Human nature will almost certainly come aboard.

Hope.

Ambition.

Curiosity.

Love.

Vanity.

Loneliness.

Anxiety.

Desire.

None of them will require a passport.

All of them will make the journey.

Human beings have crossed oceans, deserts and mountain ranges.

Soon, perhaps, they will cross planets.

The one frontier we have never fully crossed is ourselves.

That is why I suspect the defining question of the future will not be technological.

Nor economic.

Nor even interplanetary.

It will be profoundly human.

Every technological breakthrough enlarges the boundaries of what humanity can do.

That is no small achievement.

But it does not settle the older question of what humanity ought to become.

Perhaps our greatest frontier has never been the distance between Earth and Mars.

Perhaps it has always been the distance between our extraordinary capacity to reshape the world and our far more modest success in understanding ourselves.