Mars For The Working Class

“Mars For The Rich” is a song contained in King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s latest album “Infest the Rats’ Nest”. This is the song that first got me thinking about how space travel will influence the social and political aspects of our society in the future. In the song by the Australian band, they propose that the Earth will become almost inhabitable and that Mars will terraform slowly. Because of these conditions, the most privileged will migrate to Mars, leaving the Earth for the poorer class. “Mars for the privileged/ Earth for the poor/ Mars terraforming slowly/ Earth has been deformed” (King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, Mars for the Rich, 2019). Despite being a plausible scenario, I would propose the opposite. That being, the lower/working class will be sent out to other planets, such as Mars, in order to explore the primary natural resources from those planets, and send them back to planet Earth where only the 1% lives. This essay aims to, not only discussed the different scenarios for space travelling and how they are being portrayed on the media, but also compare the social design of our present day and how it might influence the future social and political structure.

To begin to understand how our society will be organised when space travel begins, we first have to understand where this idea of living in other planets began. It’s hard to define a specific date as to when humans started to get interested in space. However, it’s wildly accepted that the ‘Space Age’ started in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 1. This was revolutionary since now space didn't seem like an unreachable dream. And even though we still haven’t been able to colonise other planets as of the time I’m writing this essay, it seems likely that it will happen in a far future. “ Modern space exploration is reaching areas once only dreamed about. Mars is focal point of modern space exploration, and manned Mars exploration is a long-term goal of the United States. NASA is on a journey to Mars, with a goal of sending humans to the Red Planet in the 2030’s” (Aerospace, 2018).

Despite all this, this idea of living above or on top is not a new one. Ever since Egyptian times, we have had this physical distinction between the poor class and the higher class. Emperors would live on top of a desert mountain and the rest of the people would live in lower places. And, even though it is an outdated concept, it’s still very prominent in our society today. With the amount of air pollution getting greater every day, because of mass industrial production, countries like China or Hong Kong are being consumed by air pollution clouds, which force people to search for a better quality of life in higher grounds. However, this ‘upgrade’ is not available to everyone. Only the richest are able to buy apartments in high skyscrapers. This living situation is especially prominent in Hong Kong. Where the concept of cage homes or coffin houses was first invented. The inflation of the housing market in Hong Kong is so high that is forcing lower economic classes to move into these cage houses, where one apartment is normally shared between four different families. In average a coffin room would be between 7 square meters and 13 square meters.

An example that shows this discrepancy in film would be Bong Joon-ho’s new film, “Parasite”. This Korean film depicts the story of two families with very distinct social and economic backgrounds, and their symbiotic relationship. This film touches on topics of greed, but it focuses especially on class discrimination. In one of the scenes, it shows a storm, the rich family comments on the bad weather, but it doesn’t seem to have any consequences, as the next day arrives with a burst of bright sunshine. However, that’s not the case for the other family, since they physically have their house in the lowest point in town which, because of the heavy rain, gets flooded and forces them into a communal shelter. This logic of the richest living in the highest place and the rest on the lowest, supports the thesis that the 1% are the ones travelling to Mars when space expeditions start since there seems to be a pattern throughout history where this occurs.

This brings me to my next point, that maybe the opposite is going to happen. The richest economic classes will be the ones that stay on Earth and they will be the ones sponsoring these spatial trips to Mars or other planets. Terraforming is an important concept when discussing space travel with the intent of colonisation. Terraforming is the gradual act of making a different planet, often given the example of Mars, similar to Earth. Despite being a popular concept among the science community, this is still just a science-fiction concept. In 2018, NASA published an article saying "Our results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be put into the atmosphere; in addition, most of the CO2 gas is not accessible and could not be readily mobilised. As a result, terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology." (NASA, 2018). However, it’s never stated in the article that it will never be possible to fully colonise Mars.

As of right now, we are over-consuming our natural resources faster every year. There are a lot of factors contributing to this, whether it is large amounts of carbon dioxide production or overpopulation, these are all harming greatly our planet. And that is one the main factors as to why we are searching for other planets similar to Earth so we can terraform it. In spite of this, moving into a new planet would mean that all the natural resources have not yet been explored. Because of this, we would need to send people that know how to extract things like iron, fossil fuels or other minerals, in order to start living. This brings us to a paradoxical situation, where the only group of people with money to space travel probably don’t know how to extract the resources mentioned above, and therefore wouldn’t be able to terraform the planet. However, this would mean that the people being sent out to this new planet are of lower economic background.

“High Life” is a movie that showcases a group of criminals that were sent out into a space mission towards a black hole as an experiment. Throughout the film, there is this persistent idea of human recycling for the benefit of science and evolution. This feels especially relevant when thinking about this idea that the most ‘recyclable’ people would be the first to be sent out into space exploration. If we take this theory into consideration, then this would also be a way to partly solve the problem of overpopulation on Earth. And therefore, reduce the climate crisis that we are now facing. This would allow the Earth to gradually restore its natural resources. So in the end, it’s always more advantageous for the people in higher economic classes to stay and live on Earth rather than other planets like the Red Planet, because you will never be able to fully mimic the lifestyle you have on Earth.

Regardless of this, it is just a thought, and even though I defend that the second scenario as the most probable, both are a viable option because this is still a very abstract concept. I don’t necessarily think that it needs to be just one scenario or the other, it might actually be a combination of both groups. There has always been a fascination with the unknown. This is especially visible when talking about things like the psyche of serial killers or even the existence of an organisation such as the Illuminati. “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions(…)” (Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Reception of The Origin of Species,1887). Which might be a reason as to why people in higher classes would want to go to places like Mars, even if they know it’s a one-way ticket and a worse quality of life.

One of the main takeaways in both points is, however, the way a class or group of people is being ostracised from the rest. Both case studies presented here depict groups of people that have been ‘exiled’ from society and are forced to work for a greater good or a more powerful entity. At the core of this essay, it is not about the aspect of space travelling, but rather a capitalist system at its work. Which makes this social discrepancy all the more noticeable and divisive. “It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” (George Orwell, 1984, 1949).

To conclude, I have been wanting to write about this topic for a while now and this was finally my opportunity. At first, I had a completely different theory as to how society would be organised when space travelling began. Before I did my research and did some critical thinking on the matter, I thought that it was certain that the ones doing space expeditions would be the people with economic power. However, I feel like this a very reductive way of looking into this topic, as there are a lot of other factors playing when we think a little bit more about this. I also think that, through my research, it is clearly noticeable that this topic touches on a lot of problems we are facing in our present day. And that, in order to change any of the scenarios I presented previously, we first have to adjust the way our political system is organised, otherwise, old patterns are going to repeat themselves as they always have. I really enjoyed researching this topic, from the whole terraforming process to analysing the very nature of how history comes into play when speculating about future outcomes.

---

Reference List

Aerospace (2018) A Brief History of Space Exploration. Available at: https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-space-exploration (Accessed: 7 January 2020);

Bottero, W. (2005) Stratification: Social Division and Inequality. Routledge;

Dunbar, B. (2020) What’s next for NASA?. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/about/whats_next.html (Accessed: 7 January 2020);

Freeman, O. (2018) Future of Spaceflight. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/space-exploration/future-spaceflight/ (Accessed: 17 December 2019);

High Life (2018) Directed by Claire Denis. [Feature Film]. United Kingdom: Thunderbird Releasing;

Huxley, T. (1887) On the Reception of The Origin of Species;

Ng, N. (2017) Living conditions in Hong Kong’s poorest district have got worse in last four years ago. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/article/2089939/survey-hong-kongs-poorest-district-finds-living (Accessed: 9 January 2020);

Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. Secker & Warburg;

Parasite (2019) Directed by Bong Joon-ho. [Feature Film]. South Korea: CJ Entertainment;

Steigerwald, B. (2018) Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming (Accessed: 7 January 2020);

Vox (2018) Inside Hong Kong’s cage homes. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLrFyjGZ9NU (Accessed: 9 January 2020);