Billionaires Are Racing to Mars While We Struggle With Potholes

[The hilarious irony of spending trillions to build a dusty colony on a airless desert planet while earthlings can't get high-speed train tickets under $300.]

I was driving to work last Tuesday when my front left tire disappeared into a pothole the size of a bathtub. The car made a sound like a dropped bag of spanners. The alignment, I later learned, was ruined. The repair cost $340. As I stood by the side of the road, staring into that crater and questioning the structural integrity of my spine, my phone buzzed with a news alert: a billionaire had just launched another rocket toward Mars to test the engines for a future colony. I looked at the pothole. I looked at the rocket. I looked back at the pothole. Somewhere, in that moment, the entire logic of modern civilization snapped.Mars, in case you have not been paying attention, is an airless, radiation-blasted, dust-choked desert where the average temperature is minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no liquid water, no breathable atmosphere, no magnetic field to shield you from cosmic rays, and no pizza delivery. The planet is not a backup Earth. It is a condemned property with a nice view of nothing. Yet a handful of extremely wealthy men have decided that this is where the future of humanity lies, and they are spending trillions of dollars to build a small pressurized shed on its surface so that a dozen people can drink recycled urine and eat lettuce grown under purple LEDs.Meanwhile, back on the only planet known to host life, I cannot get a high-speed train ticket for under $300, and my daily commute involves dodging potholes that could swallow a golden retriever. The bridge down the road has been under repair since the Obama administration. The local school had to cancel science classes because the roof leaks. The public library closes at 3 p.m. on weekdays due to budget cuts. But sure, let us colonize a dead rock. That seems like a proportionate allocation of resources.The irony is so thick you could pave a road with it. The same billionaires who lecture us about becoming a “multi-planetary species” are the ones whose companies have spent decades dodging taxes, busting unions, and externalizing the cost of their pollution onto the rest of us. They will not pay to fix the pothole outside my apartment, but they will spend the GDP of a small nation to shoot a car into space as a publicity stunt. They will not fund universal pre-kindergarten, but they will build a spaceport on protected wetlands. They will not ensure that every person on Earth has clean drinking water, but they will design a machine to extract water from Martian regolith. It is not a vision for the future. It is a midlife crisis with rocket fuel.The cost of a single heavy-lift rocket launch is enough to repave every street in a midsized city for a decade. A full Mars colonization program — the ships, the habitats, the supply chains, the endless technical failures — would run into the trillions. For that money, we could build high-speed rail networks across entire continents, retrofit every inefficient building, fund basic scientific research for a century, and still have enough left over to fill in every pothole from here to Patagonia. But potholes are not sexy. High-speed trains do not generate launch-day livestreams. A repaired bridge does not put a billionaire on the cover of a magazine wearing a shiny helmet. And so the money goes up, not down.This is the core of the problem: space is a spectacle, and infrastructure is a chore. A rocket launch is a controlled explosion that briefly convinces us we are living in the future. A newly paved road is just a road. Nobody gathers in a field to watch a municipal water treatment plant come online. Nobody tweets “Make Humanity a Single-Planet Species” when a city finally replaces its lead pipes. But that is where the actual future is. The future is not a dusty pod on Mars. The future is whether or not you can get to work without destroying your suspension.The high-speed train ticket is the perfect symbol of our misplaced priorities. In parts of Europe and Asia, you can board a train in one city and step off in another three hundred miles away in the time it takes to watch a movie, and it will cost you less than a fancy dinner. In the United States, the same journey requires a plane ticket, a security pat-down, a rental car, and a small prayer that the flight is not delayed. Amtrak is a national treasure in the sense that it is old, underfunded, and occasionally on fire. Yet we are told that high-speed rail is too expensive, too complicated, too ambitious. Too ambitious? We are literally building a rocket to Mars. The train is not the ambitious part.And what will the Martian colonists actually get? A lifetime in a tin can, breathing recycled air, eating hydroponic vegetables, and communicating with Earth on a twenty-minute delay. No trees. No birds. No oceans. No breeze. No coffee shop on the corner. No lazy Sunday afternoons. Just dust, silence, and the occasional pep talk from a billionaire on a screen. If that is the dream, I would rather stay here and fight for the planet that already works. Earth has forests and rivers and fungi and thunderstorms and the smell of rain on hot pavement. It has everything, and we are letting it rot while the rich plan their exit.The “backup planet” argument is the most insulting part. They say we need Mars because Earth is fragile, because an asteroid or a nuclear war or a climate catastrophe could wipe us out. But the people making this argument are the same people accelerating the climate catastrophe. They are not trying to save humanity. They are trying to build a lifeboat that only they and their friends can board. If the Earth becomes uninhabitable, a small dome on Mars will not save us. It will be a museum of our failure, staffed by a handful of extremely fit engineers who will eventually run out of spare parts and patience.If we cannot run a single-planet civilization — if we cannot fix potholes, build trains, educate children, and distribute water — then we have no business trying to run a two-planet civilization. Mars is not a fresh start. It is a distraction. The problems we have on Earth will follow us to Mars, except they will be deadlier, because the margin for error is zero and the nearest hardware store is thirty-four million miles away. You think bureaucracy is bad now? Try filing a maintenance request with a twenty-minute radio delay.The rocket men will say that space exploration drives innovation, that it inspires the next generation, that the technologies developed for Mars will trickle down to Earth. Fine. GPS came from space. Memory foam came from space. But we do not need a colony on Mars to develop better solar panels. We need to install them on Earth, right now, on every roof and over every parking lot, and we already know how to do it. The innovation we need is not technological. It is political. It is the willingness to spend money on things that are boring but necessary, to fix what is broken instead of launching a new brochure for a planet we will never live on.I think about that pothole often. It is still there, by the way. The city put a cone in it, and the cone has become a local landmark. It is the kind of thing you learn to live with, like paper straws and return-to-office mandates. But it does not have to be this way. The same ingenuity that can land a booster on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean could also design a durable road surface. The same capital that can fund a Martian habitat could rebuild every crumbling school in the country. The same sense of purpose that drives a team to solve the problem of growing food in perchlorate-laced soil could be pointed at the problem of feeding the hungry. The only difference is that one of those projects gets a rocket launch, and the other gets a cone in a pothole.So before we colonize Mars, let us try something genuinely radical. Let us fix the pothole outside my apartment. Let us build a train that costs less than a plane ticket. Let us invest in the planet that already has breathable air and liquid water and all the ingredients for a decent life. Earth is not a practice run. It is the only home we have, and it is currently being neglected by the very people who claim to have a vision for the future. The rocket is loud, but the pothole is real. And until we learn to take care of the ground beneath our feet, no amount of rocket fuel will get us anywhere worth going.