Concrete Ethics on Mars: Utopia and the Spacetime Scales of Suffering Off-Earth

Abstract Moving between Elon Musk’s ethical commitment to human-species futures by initiating Mars settlements and his role in Trump’s 2025 “government efficiency” purge of federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, I reexamine ethics in left- and right-utopian thinking about outer-space settlement from the perspective of a future Mars settlement. I argue that utopian thinking across the political spectrum presumes some people’s suffering for the sake of universal social goods, but that utopia’s spatial presumption of a “no” place and its temporal presumption of an enduring, open future restricts its analytic value to Earth, where planetary scaled conditions buffer the consequence of others’ suffering for the beneficiaries of utopia’s promised goods. In contrast, I speculate ethnographically on Mars’s material demands on future human settlers via the 2012 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) of NASA’s Curiosity rover. On Mars, unanticipated or planned human or nonhuman action could scale to an immediate apocalypse of an entire martian world, suggesting that any nonterrestrial place demands autopian and autochronic stances, reuniting space and time, radically equalizing human and nonhuman agencies, and requiring extraterrestrial transformation of terrestrial concepts including “suffering,” “ethics,” “social,” “governance,” and even “human.” I argue that critical Black and Indigenous thinking—emerging from apocalyptic, dehumanizing historical processes on Earth but derided by conservatives as self-interested “DEI”—are thus the aptest starting frames for thriving, off-Earth human futures. I take this ethical stance because contemporary debates about Earth’s futures already speculatively invoke not-yet martian settlers but without acknowledging the material demands of their worlds, from which—moreover—we may yet learn something about how to live better on Earth.