I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about the feasibility of a Mars settlement… and the trustworthiness of the people currently best known for advocating it.

Mars is the closest place to Earth where human beings could even theoretically live. But, right now, the best-known supporters of establishing a human presence on the red planet are a gang of billionaires who are notorious for their unreliable, failure-prone technology, their long string of broken promises, and their Ayn Randian, libertarian-supremacist views. They’re absolutely not the kind of people anyone should trust to be in control of the oxygen supply.

So if they’re not the ones who should take us to Mars, who is? Or this is even a goal we should pursue at all?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

It’s not just Musk. The same goes for all the self-declared rationalists and tech-bro billionaires who think they’re head and shoulders above the common herd. Far too many of them prove to be con artists, like Sam Bankman-Fried, or swollen with lethal hubris, like Stockton Rush, or wannabe mad scientists who believe that rules are for little people, like Marc Andreessen.

None of them are trustworthy. None of them have wisdom to match their wealth or their lofty rhetoric. If we’re going to go to Mars—and, for the record, I do hope we eventually go to Mars—it shouldn’t be the private vanity project of a billionaire. It should be a shared commitment on behalf of all humanity, with only our best representatives selected for the mission.

Continue reading on OnlySky…