Earth v Mars, Musk v Thunberg

In the past week or so I have visited Luke Jerram’s twin Mars and Earth planets, as they temporarily loomed in Chichester and Lambeth cathedrals respectively, and thought of Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg, and humanity’s multiple wings and prayers.

We gawp up at Mars – as in Chichester Cathedral – and are bound to feel that humanity is never happier than when it straps a Jumbo Jet to its arse. ¹This is to adapt Henry Catto, Jr., a Republican figure describing his adored wife Jessica to me in the late 1980s. She was the generous, restless Democrat environmentalist Texan newspaper owner, Jessica Catto, and a lovely example of the contradictions of modern life. As, of course was I, on a lesser scale, visiting her in her Woody Creek bolt hole in snowy Aspen, Colorado.

We are busy building Woke inter-continental families, united by jet planes and Whatsapp. We spend our retirements cruising the warmer oceans, unless we are rich enough to jet and steam down to Antarctica. Why not look up enviously at spots like Mars, which surely we should visit and tame in some way, inhospitable as they seem? Hold his hand, and Elon Musk will take you there, to play among the stars.²This is written the day Quincy Jones died, and his arrangement for Count Basie and Sinatra of Bart Howard’s 1954 “Fly Me To the Moon” is being remembered.

It makes some difference that we also gawp up at Earth – say in Lambeth Cathedral – and hear speakers pump forth right-on tots with environmental messages repackaged from the Thunberg songbook.

Elon Musk has this base covered, too. He blasted into people’s minds as the electric car man with an AI dimension. China looms, competitively, with electric cars for the masses, if Americans and the rest of the West are allowed to get their hands on them. The cars might get delivered to us courtesy of the Belt and Road Initiative, which surely is part of China’s Shanghai Organisation schema, which may or may not long to destroy Western democracy and global justice, but also to enrich parts of the world the UN can’t reach. Or both.

What a wonderful confusion of choices. We are bound to wonder if we can get humankind to be a Net Zero affair in time to continue with an almost familiar and convenient climate.  Do or die on that front, so many other games are afoot.

I have a glimmering of a near-certainty that our immediate need is to get a grip on our minds and media: only real people living in the real world can hope to thrive alongside the mind-warping plagiarisms of Musk’s AI. Whatever else happens, we need to produce people – children, adults – of character. Surely screen-absorption can’t be a fast-track to survival?

We may or may not face a future of profound environmental difficulty, but I resist the idea that our species is doomed. Morally, aesthetically, psychologically, politically, diplomatically, so much of our lives will go on whether or not we are condemned to a period of horrendous wars for the occupation of the small bits of Planet Earth which remain habitable.

Perhaps, in any case, our last spark of usefulness to the ideal of a conscious universe will be to have some kind of mental dance with creatures on distant spheres who haven’t screwed up their atmosphere. And maybe, anyway, it will be AI robots who will take the germ of an idea of a human or even a post-human consciousness out into space.

Innumerable human beings – virtuous, ignominious, or barely aware of intention – will have played their part in the human saga, however it plays out.

Of the pair who most feature in this little squib, if it’s got to be Musk vs Thunberg who’s the “biggest hope for humanity” honour, my money’s on Musk by a whisker. However, it is Thunberg who is the troll on my shoulder, enjoining me to ride my bike to the shops, whilst I may.

Footnotes

• 1
  This is to adapt Henry Catto, Jr., a Republican figure describing his adored wife Jessica to me in the late 1980s. She was the generous, restless Democrat environmentalist Texan newspaper owner, Jessica Catto, and a lovely example of the contradictions of modern life. As, of course was I, on a lesser scale, visiting her in her Woody Creek bolt hole in snowy Aspen, Colorado.
• 2
  This is written the day Quincy Jones died, and his arrangement for Count Basie and Sinatra of Bart Howard’s 1954 “Fly Me To the Moon” is being remembered.