In a 2023 interview with Dark Enlightenment promoter Lex Fridman, Amazon mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos shared his vision of the future:
“I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” he said. “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.”
This bombastic idea can only be comprehended under the mentality of TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism).
Under this mentality —which every major technocrat in Silicon Valley secretly subscribes to, as we constantly try to remind our readers of this— consuming all the resources of planet Earth, and decimating the ecosystems on which every other living species inhabits, is a small price to pay if we ensure the spread of our (postbiological) descendants throughout the cosmos.
Bezos tries to justify his argument by mentioning the benefits he sees in having a trillion humans overpopulating the solar system: since the genius of Einstein and Mozart only appears once every several centuries, a bigger population would ensure more living geniuses.
Frankly, I cannot think of a better counterargument to this idiotic statement, than the one provided by the late evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Geniuses are like diamonds: we only believe that they are rare out of an artificial sense of scarcity. The diamond mines in Africa were controlled for decades by the De Beers cartel in order to fix the prices. Same goes with human talent: The next Einstein could be working right now in some Chinese factory, assembling the next smartphone you will be purchasing via Amazon. The next Mozart could be trying to fix a refurbished Amazon keyboard in their impoverished village.
Or maybe they both drowned in Ceuta last month, struggling for a dream of a better life right now; not in a hundred thousand years, according to the space-opera fantasies of the techbros in which they picture themselves as the heroes… instead of what they really are.
Whitley Strieber’s 2011 book The Key relates a purported physical meeting he had one fateful night—during a book tour in Canada—with an enigmatic character he later named ‘The Master of the Key’. Among the many intriguing things he told Whitley, was that humanity was doomed because the person who was going to discover the secret of antigravity—necessary for the same colonization of space Bezos and his pals dream of—had been exterminated by the Nazis during World War 2.
And yet that human tragedy was also deemed necessary at the time, by other architects of the future.
Even if I believed such a fateful reunion between Strieber and ‘The Master’ ever took place, I don’t necessarily put much stock in that statement—because that’s simply not how scientific progress takes place. People like Bezos obsess with the myth of Einstein, because they also perceive themselves as exceptional, one-in-a-million individuals. But scientific progress is paved through the cumulative effect of countless unnamed heroes, and without those achievements the heroes we do care to remember and celebrate would not have been able to make their mark.
During one of his lectures, Mexican professor Antonio Lazcano Araujo gave a sobering statement to his class of young would-be scientists: If Charles Darwin hadn’t written On The Origin of Species, the importance of natural selection in the evolution of life would have been discovered anyway (probably in just a few years, since Alfred Russell Wallace was about to go public but Darwin beat him to it).
If anything, Lazcano observes, ‘genius’ has more merit in Art than in Science. Relativity or the Laws of Motion would have been understood sooner or later, even if Einstein or Newton had never been born. But only Mozart would have been able to compose The Magic Flute just the way he did; only Picasso would have been able to paint Guernica just like he did; only Michelangelo would have been able to sculpt David just like he did. Because Art involves personal vision and interpretation.
Art is, in that regard, superior to Science.
That realization makes the tragedy of our current AI age even more horrendous, since the wealth of the technological oligarchy is being built upon the systematic theft and immolation of countless unique works of Art. Meanwhile, a generation of children are told they are wasting their time pursuing a career in Art, for soon everyone will have their own Mozart machine capable of vomiting out symphonic simulacra at the touch of a button. I simply cannot think of a more efficient way to smother the human spirit.
The Bible says “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” If we thought the same of every children in the world today—with minds like fires just waiting to be lit, as Plutarch said—we might be able to build a kinder, more just society; instead of a wasteland of humming pyramids and book chop-shops, erected to the fleeting vanity of aspiring god-emperors.
