When they're rich, it's eccentricity.

The only difference between this guy and
Elon Musk is $20.5 billion which is...uh...sorry
I can't remember what-wow...billion. With a 'b'...

So I'm not saying that Elon Musk is wrong about colonizing Mars but I would like to point out that if he were some guy on the street with say a sandwich board and some badly xeroxed pamphlets, instead of being a billionaire speaking at SXSW (pronounced skzzsswi, I assume) we would probably dismiss him as a nutter. I suppose wealth hath its privileges too. Anyway, Musk appeared at this year's South by Southwest conference to talk up his space plans and to haltingly predict doom for human civilization-well, not predict but, well here, click this first.

I'm confused, are we talking castles and
jousts, or just rampant ignorance and wealth
inequity? Because we might be there...

"If you know that, if you know there's likely to be, well you don't know, but there's likely to be another dark ages-which is seems like there probably will be at some point. I'm not predicting that we're about to enter another dark ages, but there's some probability we will, particularly if there's a third world war."

-Elon Musk, entrepreneur, industrialist, 

harbinger of doom, or...well, not doom, 

you don't know...but likely doom

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm just
suggesting that Isaac Asimov's estate
should probably be taking to a lawyer.

Then after not predicting the collapse of civilization, but really, totally predicting the collapse of civilization, he went on to make the case for sending humans to Mars as sort of 'a back-up your data' bulwark against armageddon:

"Um, then we want to make sure there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of the dark ages."

-Elon Musk, going full Seldon

Ok, so I can't argue with the wisdom of the Seldon plan, but does any one else have a problem with Elon Musk running the whole thing?

Personally, I see the extinction of country
as one of the perks of a new dark age.

It's not so much that I have a problem with Elon Musk personally, it's more rich people in general. Like, it's cool that he's using his vast, preposterous wealth to advance the cause of science, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the cause of science being up to any one person. Sure, he could build his own back up civilization on Mars, but it would be his civilization.What if say, he hated country music and didn't include it in the vault on his space colony. I mean, he'd be correct to hate country music, but should that really be his call? 

Well, it's his space colony...you might point out. True, but only because he's crazy rich and he's only crazy rich because we, as a culture, let him be. As in, we haven't grabbed our pitchforks and torches and bashed in his front gate which we probably could have after he launched that roadster into space.

Pictured: a $200,000 car launched into space with a $90 million rocket.
But even more impressive is the fact that in the back ground you can even
see a planet where wealth disparity makes shit like this possible.

"No seriously though,
taxes are for poor people."

-Jeff Bezos 

Speaking of pitchforks and torches, Musk isn't the only rich to buy his way loose of the surly bonds of Earth. Jeff Bezos, whose company Amazon apparently falls into a tax bracket so high they don't have to pay anything, is also planning to boldly go where no symbol of everything wrong with unfettered capitalism has gone before. He reaffirmed his company's plan to take some of the ridiculous cash reserves he made by strangling the life-blood out of America's retail economy and explore the endless reaches of outer space. And presumably once there, continue to not pay taxes. 

How many Duckbergians were living in
abject poverty while this asshole swam
around in a seven story bin full of gold?

So two things freak me out here: First, that it's possible in our civilization for someone to control this much wealth. Like, I don't care how smart or successful you are, nobody should be this rich. And second that our space program is so poorly funded that anyone with a few billion dollars can decide the fate of human kind and by extension, country music. Look, I don't want to tell these titans of industry-wait-is it industry when you just use money to make more money? Anyway, I don't want to tell them what to do with their embarrassing wealth but...wait, no, that's a lie, I do want to tell them what to do with their embarrassing wealth. 

Sure, no one can deny the appeal of the frozen, radiation-soaked hellscape of Mars, but what if Elon Musk put some research money into a zero-emission car most of us could afford instead of shooting one that costs more than the average American home into space? Or if Jeff Bezos just paid his goddamn taxes? Admittedly these aren't sexy ideas, and no one's going to want me to talk at SXSW, but they might keep this planet livable a while longer. 

"Yeah, but...Mars...is awesome."

-Some colonist, moments before being struck 

by a $200,000 roadster falling from orbit