So here I am, back on Facebook after fifteen years in the wilderness, and since it's called Facebook, here's my face. Brace yourselves. For those who missed the interim, I spent part of that time inventing an alter ego called Johnnybitches, a guy who'd point a camera at himself and complain about whatever crawled under his skin that day, then throw it up on YouTube for the benefit of nobody in particular. Parking lots, bridges, committees, the general state of things, Johnnybitches had opinions. Well, he's back, and this may be the ultimate Johnnybitches, because today the man is bitching about the fate of the entire human species and whether we ought to pack up and move to Mars. Fittingly, the whole thing started right here, because coming back to this place is how I found the old friend who set it off.
It started with a phone call I didn't see coming. An old friend I hadn't really talked to in twenty years sent me his number, I sent mine back, and two minutes later my phone was ringing. An hour and a half later we were still going, two old men with patched-up hearts arguing about the fate of the species like it was 1982 and somebody had just put on a Dead record. This friend is not a casual guy. He's a plant scientist who, back when most of us were figuring out how to pay rent, was working with NASA growing wheat inside sealed steel chambers and measuring every breath the crop took, so that someday astronauts could eat bread on the way to the stars. Later he grew lettuce in thin, low-pressure air for inflatable greenhouses meant for the Moon and Mars. He was way ahead of the curve, and he'll tell you so. Then, deep into that call, he dropped this on me with no ceremony at all: after decades of thinking about it, he doesn't think we should go to Mars. You can't adequately shield people from the cosmic radiation out there, he said, and in his professional opinion there's no reliable way to bring them back.
I nearly drove off the road, and I wasn't even driving. I'd reached the exact same conclusion a year earlier, ranting into my phone in a parked car. He got there through the physics. I got there through meaning. Two completely different roads, and we both ended up at the same rest stop with the same bad news.
Now, in fairness, I'm not a rocket scientist. I'm a landscape designer and builder, and a sculptor, and I've been at it for more than thirty years. On the landscape side I've spent my career pushing native plants, less lawn, and spaces where living things and actual human beings can coexist without one strangling the other. On the sculpture side, nearly everything I've made came from metal that already had a past life: stuff from the side of the road, things people leave at my studio door like I'm running a foundling hospital for scrap, tag-sale finds, auction scores, the rusted guts of the industrial age. I don't melt that history down. I carry it forward. So my qualification for weighing in on interplanetary colonization is roughly this: I have spent my entire life asking how you keep meaning alive in plants, materials, and places without cutting it off from where it came from. That turns out to be the whole question, and nobody at the rocket company has called to ask me about it.
Let me give you a case study. Not long ago I was walking around the parking lot of a brand-new grocery store in Greenfield, Massachusetts, because that's what landscape people do for fun, and I couldn't stop reading the site. You could see where they'd mapped the land, where the limit of work stopped at the tree line, the berm they left to keep the old trees standing, clover sown to fix nitrogen in tired soil, and the curb cuts that let a wheelchair roll through without a bump. Honestly, it was mostly good work. Then I walked around back and found a few thousand square feet of pavement for delivery trucks that almost nobody uses, a slab of dead asphalt sealing off living ground for no reason anyone could explain. I stood there and thought: we're a species that still can't reliably put a parking lot on the earth gracefully. Every designer is supposed to know the land has a carrying capacity, and we still blow it on a few thousand square feet in Greenfield. And we're ready to lay out an entire civilization on a frozen, irradiated rock forty million miles away? Sure. What could go wrong?
Here's what I mean by meaning, because that's where the whole thing hinges. Not long ago I was down in the basement of an older woman I know, helping her think about letting go of some of her stuff before age makes the decision for her, the way my own parents cleared things out so us kids wouldn't have to. She told me she couldn't bring herself to throw out things that came down from her great-grandmother. Her mother had worried over those things and carried them through her whole life, and dumping them now would feel like a slap in the face to three generations of women. Standing in that basement it hit me: meaning is physical. It gets carried, object by object and place by place, hand to hand, generation to generation, and that carrying is what holds a culture together. When I was a kid in Orchard Park, New York, I played in a creek called Smokes Creek, and I had no idea it was named for a Seneca war chief, or that families along its banks had hidden people escaping slavery in their cellars and barns. The land was holding that memory long before I knew the words for it. That's what a culture is, memory rooted in a place, which is why all those utopias built from scratch on a blank piece of ground keep falling apart. They skip the rooting. Look at our oldest stories, every creation myth, every constellation, every sacred calendar: they're made of animals, plants, rivers, and mountains. Our meaning grew out of a living world. So what I said in that car was simple. You can't go to Mars unless you bring the whole ark.
Now let me be fair to the other team, because I'm a crank, not a hack. The people pushing hardest for Mars, Elon Musk most famously, have a real argument. It's insurance. Every human being, every library, every song, every idea sits on one planet. One asteroid, one nuclear war, or one bad week at a virology lab, and that's the whole show. So, the thinking goes, we become a multiplanetary species and build a backup copy of civilization somewhere else to keep the light of consciousness burning. That isn't a dumb idea. It's an enormous one, and there's serious engineering behind it. I'll go further. I've used tools those same people built to help me think this all through, so I'm not throwing rocks from a cave. Some of what we learn trying to live in space comes right back home. My friend's career is the proof: the sealed chambers, artificial light, and closed-loop growing systems he worked on for NASA are now part of the vertical farms feeding people in cities here on Earth. And the urge to go see what's over the next hill is one of the best things about us. So I'm not against wonder. My question is smaller and meaner: a backup copy of what, exactly?
Humans have done the ark thing before, and it worked beautifully. The Polynesian voyagers crossed thousands of miles of open Pacific in double-hulled canoes, steering by stars, swells, and birds, which makes me feel bad about getting lost in Holyoke. They didn't just bring people. They brought the whole package: what scholars call canoe plants, taro, breadfruit, sweet potato, banana, plus pigs, dogs, and chickens, plus genealogies, star knowledge, and chants that named islands nobody on board had ever seen. The cultures that grew up on Hawai'i and Aotearoa were changed by their new homes, but they were still themselves, and full of meaning. It worked for one reason: the islands could take it. There was soil, rain, and a living world ready to receive what the canoes carried. The ark had somewhere to land.
Mars has nowhere to land. There's no living soil, no water cycle, no ecology, no air you'd want to breathe, and a constant drizzle of radiation that my friend, the guy who actually worked on this, says we can't adequately block. A Mars colony wouldn't be an island that takes in a culture. It'd be a sealed box that every generation has to keep from killing everybody inside it, forever. A very expensive submarine parked on a dead planet.
And when you take my own rant seriously, "bring everything," it turns around and bites you. Everything isn't a packing list. It's the soil microbes and fungal networks, the pollinators, the bacteria living in your gut that you've never thanked, millions of species tangled together in ways we've barely started to understand. It's also the places, the rivers, hills, and creeks our stories are stuck to. You can't pack a web. You can't fold up a watershed and stuff it in a cargo hold. Follow "take everything" to its honest end and you land at a conclusion so obvious it's almost embarrassing: the only vessel big enough to hold everything is the one we're already riding.
Something else always smelled off to me about the Mars pitch, and it took me a while to name it. Conservation, protecting rivers, forests, and soil, is also about future generations, so on paper it looks like the same argument. It isn't. Conservation protects the conditions for people who come after us to live here, in continuity with us, on the same rivers and dirt, inheriting the same web of life and the same stories. The Mars pitch protects humanity as a category, a species label, even if the descendants share nothing with us but a genome. One protects a relationship, and the other protects a brand. Look at who collects. Clean up a river and your neighbors are swimming in it next summer. A Mars colony asks for staggering sacrifice now in exchange for a payoff measured in centuries, one the people making the decision will never live to see, depending on a thousand things breaking right, from energy and spare parts to manufacturing and the margins of a return trip that has never been tested. That's not a plan, it's a lottery ticket the size of a skyscraper.
Take the exact disaster this is supposed to protect against. Sixty-six million years ago a rock the size of a city hit off the coast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs along with most other life on Earth. It was as bad as it gets. Soot and dust blacked out the sun, and the impact winter probably lasted years, maybe a couple of decades, while life's full diversity took far longer to recover. But even in the darkest of those years, Earth still had air to breathe, water to drink, gravity our bones were built for, and a magnetic field and atmosphere blocking the radiation that would slowly cook us on Mars. It also had survivors. Little furry mammals made it through, and we're their grandkids. So here's the punchline nobody at the launch pad wants to hear: the worst day on Earth is probably more livable than the best day on Mars. Now picture the colonists. Say Earth needs a few generations to recover. Meanwhile, up there, kids are being born inside the box. They grow up with their own stories, their own priorities, their own slowly drifting dialect, and to them Earth turns into a scary blue legend their great-grandparents ran away from. Do they come back? Can they? And if they show up, do we recognize them? The true believers will say the colony doesn't need to come back, that it only matters that intelligence survives somewhere. Fine, but survives as what? A stranger carrying our DNA isn't what any of us mean when we say we're saving humanity.
There's a quieter version of the escape plan, and it isn't a conspiracy theory. It's been reported in plain daylight. Some of the richest people on the planet are buying remote hideouts in New Zealand, digging shelters under their compounds, and paying for luxury survival condos built inside old missile silos in Kansas, which is a sentence I never expected to write. The writer Douglas Rushkoff tells a story about being paid to advise a group of very rich investors, whose most urgent question was how they'd keep their own security guards loyal after the collapse. Same ethic, different costume: escape the catastrophe instead of preventing it, build a lifeboat for the few instead of a better ship for everyone, and opt out of the shared web on purpose.
Even on its own terms the bunker is a trap, because everything we depend on runs on the sun. Our sleep, moods, hormones, and bones all run on daylight. You can grow food without sunlight, and my friend helped prove it, but then every bite depends on electricity, pumps, and spare parts, and when the power goes the farm dies in days. We actually ran this experiment. In the early nineties eight people sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert, a glass-walled world meant to sustain itself. Within about a year and a half the oxygen had dropped from twenty-one percent to around fourteen, roughly what you'd breathe on a high mountain, and somebody had to quietly pump more in. Most of the pollinating insects died, ants and cockroaches took over, the crew was hungry much of the time, and by the end the eight of them had split into two factions that barely spoke to each other. Eight people, two years, sunlight pouring through the glass, and the real world just outside the door, and they still went full Lord of the Flies. Back in 1909, E. M. Forster wrote a story called "The Machine Stops," about humanity living underground in separate little cells, every need handled by a vast Machine, everyone talking to each other only through screens. Sound familiar? People come to fear the surface and worship the Machine, and when it finally starts breaking down, nobody remembers how it works or how to live without it. Spending thirty years underground is just a slower way of feeding yourself into a machine.
So what's the alternative? Something we already know how to do, because we've done it here. In 1987 Brazil adopted a formal policy of not making contact with the isolated tribes living deep in the Amazon. They learned the hard way, over generations, that contact brought epidemics and land theft and sometimes wiped out whole peoples within a few years. Now they protect those groups by watching from a distance and deliberately staying away. India keeps North Sentinel Island off-limits so the people there are left alone. Around the world there are probably more than a hundred uncontacted peoples, some known only from an aerial photograph, an abandoned campsite, or a single arrow fired at a passing airplane, which is a review I respect. We protect them by choosing not to know them. Think about how strange and beautiful that is: human beings deciding the right move is to know less. We've even written that humility into the rules for space. Under international treaty, spacecraft headed for places that might harbor life are supposed to be sterilized, so we don't smear our germs across a world that might have its own story going. Granted, a microbe on Mars isn't a tribe in the Amazon, but the lesson about contact you can't undo is the same lesson, and we learned it here first. Confucius put it better than I can, about twenty-five hundred years ago: when you know a thing, recognize that you know it, and when you don't know a thing, recognize that you don't. That is knowledge. Sometimes knowing where to stop is part of what you know.
Now for the part that keeps me up at night, even without coffee. People have been running a simple experiment with AI image generators. You give the machine a photograph, a person, a dog, a landscape, and ask it to reproduce it exactly. Then you hand it its own copy and ask it to reproduce that, then the copy of the copy, and around you go. Generation by generation the picture drifts. Faces warp, colors go sour, features twist, and after enough rounds you're staring at something distorted and nightmarish that looks nothing like where you started. Researchers studying AI systems trained on their own output have a name for a related problem. They call it model collapse. A copy of a copy, cut off from the living source, degrades. Hang on to that.
Because seventy-three years ago, Philip K. Dick saw it coming. In 1953 he published a story called "The Preserving Machine," about a man named Doc Labyrinth who's terrified that classical music won't survive the coming collapse of civilization, because paper burns, records shatter, and people forget. So he builds a machine that turns musical scores into living animals, on the theory that living things are good at surviving and paper isn't. A Mozart piece comes out as a bright little bird. Bach becomes a bug. Wagner becomes a heavy, bad-tempered beast, which honestly checks out. He turns them loose in the woods to wait out the end of the world, and the animals do what living things do: they adapt. They get tougher, meaner, and spikier, with claws and stingers. When he finally catches one and runs it back through his machine to get the music out, what comes out is twisted and ugly. The survival strategy worked perfectly, and it preserved the wrong thing.
Here's the part I can't shake. That story came out in 1953, and my friend, the scientist who spent his early career figuring out how to plant gardens on Mars, was born that same year. Seventy-three years later he's reached the story's conclusion through the actual science. The music didn't survive by being turned into something tough enough for a hostile world. It survives the way it always has, by being carried, by hand and heart, from one living person to the next. Every morning now, before the sun is up, my friend sits at his piano working through Satie, slowly, one bar at a time, playing it a million times until it starts to sound right. That's how music actually survives. It doesn't go in a capsule. It gets practiced and passed on.
So, Elon, if by some cosmic accident this ever reaches you, or anybody else at those altitudes, here it is from the ground floor. I know how this probably goes. I'm a guy with a welding torch and a native-plant habit shouting into the wind from a small town in western Massachusetts, and the odds that anyone at a rocket company reads this are roughly the odds of a salmon climbing eight dams. But salmon keep trying, and so will I. I'm not against the stars. I look up at them every clear night, and my friend writes about astronomy because it's his real passion. We can satisfy that wonder with telescopes, probes, and plain old curiosity without trying to move in. The real work is here: restoring the rivers, rebuilding the soil, reopening the passages we blocked, keeping the web whole, and, while we're at it, maybe learning to design a parking lot. What's worth saving was never just the species. It's the relationship between people and the living world that made them, and you can't evacuate that. As a friend of mine put it in a song, the best-built greenhouse in the sky is the one under our feet. Before we try to haul the ark anywhere, we ought to learn to take care of it where it already is.
And that's the ultimate Johnnybitches, signing off. Fifteen years off this platform and I come back swinging at the space program. I make no promises about the next one. It could be the fate of civilization, or it could be another parking lot. If you made it this far, congratulations, you have more patience than most committees I've dealt with. Go outside. Put your hands in some dirt, plant something that belongs where you live, call an old friend you haven't talked to in twenty years, and listen to what the river's been trying to tell you. And Elon, if you're out there, the comments are open. I'll be right here on the ground floor, where the good stuff grows.