Elon Musk has a plan of salvation. It won't work.

One warm night in my mid-twenties, I sat in a Florida parking lot with an electrical engineer. We were, alternately, making out and discussing plans for saving the human race. I was mostly dependent on God for this project at the time. His plan—to my astonishment— was to colonize Mars.

“It’s the only thing left,” he said.

Are you kidding me? I thought. It was the first time I'd ever heard such a thing. Imagine! I was indignant. Imagine living unprotected in waves of solar radiation (you couldn’t), or, more likely, in transparent bubbles through which you watch the fleeting rivulets of cold stewy unbreathable air? Imagine living off of the three tasteless plants you could cultivate under grow lights in hydroponic corridors under Martian soil?

Worse: Imagine doing all these things and remembering a planet once-upon-a-time, which produced millions of colorful plants and birds, which was strewn with crystalline lakes and rivers, which smelled like soil and honeysuckle and iron, and on which you’ll never stand again? The prospect was awful. I couldn't believe anyone seriously entertained it. But it turns out that my electrical engineer was one of many who believed that mankind's fallback plan should be a freezing, inhospitable planet 90 million miles away.

A more famous adherent to this idea, obviously, is Elon Musk—American deity extraordinaire!—whose Space-X rocket prototypes exploded a few months ago.

The Reuters article in my newsfeed paired it with an image of a thick tongue of flame, as though the rocket had been part of a funeral rite. What a sight! There weren’t any people aboard, of course; it was an unmanned probe, part of testing for the Spaceship project, destined—according to Elon—to take billionaires to the moon in 2023, and to lay the groundwork for Elon’s big ambition: Mars. According to reports, the test was a relative success—the rocket did successfully land before bursting into flames. An impressive technical achievement. The engineers would go back to the drawing board, tweak something about the fuel tank, and spend another million or so to test another prototype. A rocket in the sky would grace the sky again soon enough.

A few days before Elon’s rocket exploded, though, the Atlantic published a piece by Shannon Stirone that I wanted to wave in the face of every citizen of the country: Mars is a Hellhole. The article itself is great—you should read it—but you can get the gist from the headline.

Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s hot, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.

Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s cold, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.

It is manifestly unsuited for human life and no amount of technological prowess is going to turn it into a paradise. Can we just put this to bed this now?

Well, it doesn’t seem like it.

Okay, then.

Of course, Musk is a high-level god in the American pantheon, which is to say: He’s got the money and power to do just about whatever he likes, and he does it all in the brazen, devil-may-care spirit of the mythical American cowboy. He’ll spend millions on car elevators. He’ll name his kid an unintelligible string of babble. He’ll sell you a flamethrower. And for these reasons he is venerated from the sacred halls of Reddit to the boardrooms of startups in Silicon Valley. For these reasons some, at least, are inclined to believe him when he says he can do the impossible—say, for example, move humanity to Mars.

And, granted, maybe he can do certain nigh-unto-impossible things (like, say, popularizing the electric automobile on the shores of a gas-guzzling country). But we’ve got to put our collective foot down when he starts romanticizing Mars as a future place for humanity.

Elon's plan of salvation isn't even close to new. Moving on to the next "pure" place is how this country has always dealt with its problems. Ancestry.com informs me, personally, that I’m from a long line of leavers. My ancestors headed to the American continent on some of the first ships out of England, landed on the east coast, headed to Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio, then moved further on whenever we felt like it. That was how we coped, and how we still cope: When things get too crowded, dirty, or smelly, we leave. Find a fresh, untouched, pure place. Build something new.

And I think that's kind of the American assumption, right? There will always be fresh material. There will always be a new tomorrow and somewhere else to move to. There will always be a place to expand to, and materials to expand with, so...go ahead! Pull up roots, make more fuel, build more rockets, make more worlds. It all seems so possible because that is the assumption which has fueled our culture.

The problem, of course, is that this assumption is manifestly false. We are fragile beings on a fragile planet, subject to the laws of physics and biology. Neither or resources nor our time are endless. Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits.

"Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits."

To be fair, though, maybe Elon’s not completely wrong? Perhaps human life will, indeed, peel itself away from the crust of this planet and move elsewhere in remnants, in little Ark-like pods of explorers. Perhaps we will even form refugee civilizations capable of sustaining themselves on hydroponic plants and vitamin capsules. But even if that happens, I have zero expectation that that life will cease to be of Earth in the ways that matter. Any group of people, transplanted anywhere else, will face the same problems as we do here, but in a place that’s way less habitable and way less pleasant.

Can you see it? Our great-grandchildren growing up in pods on an inhospitable planet; eating mineral pellets and suiting up in veneers of airtight, flame-retardant...stuff?

I can. I imagine Earth sliding into myth. I imagine children of the future being told about this planet as children now are told about heaven, that ethereal, unreachable place, perfect for humans—but unattainable. I imagine mankind's culpability being slid through a thousand interpretive lenses until it is not our fault at all. I imagine the past morphing into the future, and the Earth as paradise, as unattainable utopia…

Yes, it’s bleak. That we have come to this, despite all our technology and all our best efforts, would lend itself to some version of the Christian prayer: “What must we do to be saved?”

Which is actually the wrong prayer, or at least, an outdated one. We already know what we must do. We have very little time to do it, and apparently no collective willingness to admit that we have no other choice. So I guess the prayer becomes now, “What will we do to be saved?”

As long as we persist in taking Musk’s very American idea seriously—that is, so long as we insist in denying reality—the answer will continue to be “Not much.”