[Tech billionaires] will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism….

This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines. They are too credulous and short-sighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now….

Excerpt from More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, published by Hachette Book Group, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 288-289.

As researched in depth in Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and other tech billionaires envision a future for humanity powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, and served by superintelligent AIs. Instead of addressing the crucial problems we are facing on Planet Earth, like the global climate crisis, they funnel their so-called effective altruism (EA) into funding research and projects for the longterm, known as longtermism.

Paramount to the tech billionaires, and soon-to-be trillionaire, is the propagation of our species for endless future generations to come across our Milky Way galaxy. This techno-dream, fueled by unlimited growth, rests upon technological singularity, usually referred to as the Singularity. Hence their current push to develop a powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) and human-machine hybrids. This Singularity “will usher in a utopia, end scarcity, and make biomedical discoveries that will allow us to live forever or nearly so” (Becker, p. 22).  

According to Elon Musk, as quoted in Becker’s book (p. 223), going to Mars “enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth,” like asteroids, nuclear war, or rogue AI. Or, as he put it on Twitter, “We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets.”

Jeff Bezos, Musk’s space rival billionaire, is concerned about a culture of stagnation if we stay here on Earth. “Do we want stasis and rationing or do we want dynamism and growth?” Bezos asked in 2019, as quoted by Becker (p. 222). “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he said in 2023. “We can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system…. The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations…. We will take materials from the moon and from near-Earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on,…”

As stated on the book jacket of More Everything Forever, “these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.”

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Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.