In 'More Everything Forever,' Adam Becker critiques billionaires’ futuristic obsessions as misguided

Adam Becker challenges Silicon Valley’s ideology of technological salvation.

Mars. (c) NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

Elon Musk has long championed the idea that humanity must evolve into a space-faring civilization. To Musk, colonizing Mars is not only an adventure but a survival imperative. “We must preserve the light of consciousness,” he declared, envisioning one million people living on Mars within two decades. But science journalist Adam Becker, in his incisive and highly readable new book More Everything Forever, argues that such dreams are not only unrealistic but dangerous distractions from real-world challenges.

Becker, who holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics, takes direct aim at Musk’s vision. According to Becker, life on Mars would likely be unbearable—far worse than anything we might endure on a struggling Earth. The surface radiation alone would be lethal. The toxic dust poses further hazards, and Mars's lack of a breathable atmosphere makes even survival a nightmare scenario. Exposure to the open air would cause saliva to boil off one’s tongue before asphyxiation occurs.

Even assuming some kind of subterranean colony is feasible, Becker underscores the immense logistical and moral issues. Any Martian colony would rely heavily on supplies from Earth, including air and water, likely delivered by Musk’s own SpaceX. “Even the air the Mars residents breathe would cost money,” Becker points out. He concludes, “Mars would make Antarctica look like Tahiti,” painting a grim picture of any off-Earth settlement.

Tech fantasies as salvation narratives

Becker’s critique extends well beyond Mars. In More Everything Forever, he situates Musk’s vision within a broader framework he calls the ideology of technological salvation—a belief system dominating Silicon Valley’s most ambitious projects. Whether it’s AI, space colonization, or digital immortality, the billionaire class sees technology not just as a tool, but as the only means of saving humanity.

This ideology, Becker argues, contains three key traits. First, it is reductive: it simplifies the world’s complex challenges into binary technological solutions. Second, it is profit-driven: these visions align perfectly with Silicon Valley’s hunger for growth and disruption. And third, it is transcendent: it offers a futuristic utopia that justifies ignoring or undermining existing moral, ethical, and societal boundaries.

According to Becker, this salvationist mindset creates a binary vision of the future—utopia or annihilation. It flattens debate, casting critics as enemies of progress and branding skeptical voices as obstacles to survival itself. These ideas aren't just speculative; they justify real-world decisions that can divert billions away from addressing tangible crises.

The AI paradox: promise and peril

Artificial intelligence occupies a central role in Becker’s critique. He traces the debate between AI evangelists and doomsayers, showing how both groups reflect different sides of the same tech-utopian coin. For instance, Ray Kurzweil envisions AI eliminating poverty and disease and allowing humans to live indefinitely. On the other end, AI skeptics warn about misaligned superintelligences—such as a hypothetical AI that converts the world into paper clips in its quest to fulfill a singular goal.

Becker suggests these opposing visions are rooted in the same flawed logic: both assume that future technologies will fundamentally reshape the human condition, and both ignore current social inequalities in favor of abstract, often absurd, future scenarios.

He also critiques figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who propose that AI-driven wealth can be redistributed to soften its disruptive effects. Altman once wrote, “The changes coming are unstoppable,” but insisted the future could be “almost unimaginably great.” To Becker, these declarations are emblematic of Silicon Valley’s habit of imagining utopian futures without grappling with the inequalities and systemic failures of the present.

Philanthropy meets fantasy

One of the more troubling consequences of the ideology of technological salvation, Becker argues, is its influence on philanthropy. Instead of investing in well-established solutions to current problems—like providing bed nets to prevent malaria—tech billionaires have funneled resources into abstract risks that may never materialize. This is often facilitated through the “effective altruism” movement, which promotes the use of data and reason to maximize the impact of charitable giving.

Becker examines how “longtermist” calculations have led some effective altruists to bizarre conclusions. One influential paper suggested that spending $100 on AI safety could save a trillion future lives, making it far more valuable than interventions like malaria prevention. “For a strong longtermist,” Becker notes, “investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.”

This line of reasoning, he argues, shows how the ideology of technological salvation can distort our moral compass. By focusing on far-fetched hypotheticals, it devalues concrete, life-saving efforts happening today in favor of speculative futures that may never arrive.

Old fears in shiny new forms

While Silicon Valley projects itself as a forward-thinking, cutting-edge hub of innovation, Becker shows that its obsessions often stem from age-old fears. Chief among them is the fear of death. The billionaire class, with its access to nearly limitless resources, is chasing after technological immortality, cosmic expansion, and AI transcendence as a way to dodge their mortality.

Quoting scholar Kate Crawford from Atlas of A.I., Becker highlights how space has become “the ultimate imperial ambition,” representing a kind of metaphysical escape from the constraints of Earth and the body. Similarly, writer Meghan O’Gieblyn observes that technology has usurped the role of religion, turning eternal questions into engineering problems.

In More Everything Forever, Becker portrays this shift as not only misguided but also deeply human. These grand projects are less about progress than they are about existential despair—a desperate search for meaning and salvation in an uncertain world.

A call for earthly compassion

Amid all the sharp critiques, Becker’s book offers a hopeful, humanistic alternative. Rather than fantasizing about galactic empires or superintelligent overlords, he calls for a renewed focus on our shared planet and the people on it. He emphasizes the richness of the present, the value of compassion, and the importance of incremental efforts to make the world better—right here, right now.

“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” he writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.”

In a cultural moment dominated by promises of techno-paradise and fear-mongering about hypothetical apocalypses, Becker’s voice is a vital reminder that human dignity, care, and responsibility begin—not in some interplanetary colony or digital heaven—but here on Earth.

By exposing the flaws in Silicon Valley’s ideology of technological salvation, More Everything Forever urges us to re-center our priorities and focus on the world we actually live in.