An anticipatory regime of multiplanetary life: on SpaceX, Martian colonisation and terrestrial ruin

In recent years, the aerospace engineering corporation SpaceX has been a vocal – and perhaps the foremost – contributor to the recent repopularisation of a discourse proposing the colonisation of Mars. This discourse has been intensively generative: SpaceX’s press releases regularly command prominent headlines in the news; the social media posts of Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, invariably attract thousands of replies; and a lively meme culture further amplifies what Musk himself has described as a mission to ‘make life multiplanetary’ – an imagined future in which humans have ‘occupied’ Mars. Such speculations about the future can be understood as ‘anticipatory regimes’ in which some notional, wished-for possibility is legitimised through historical narratives and inflected with the anxieties and hopes of the present. For SpaceX, this has involved assuming the inevitability of terrestrial ruin while mobilising a powerful discourse of great men and scientific endeavour embedded in the logics of colonial and capitalist expansion. This anticipatory regime occupies a prominent and generative position in net culture, but it also functions to obscure other possibilities for meaningful alternatives and urgent action in the here and now. To pursue the mission to make life multiplanetary is to marginalise urgent, vital discussions concerning colonial reckoning, environmental reconciliation, and the redistribution of extreme wealth disparities.