Carpe Momentum: Escape Velocity or Earth First?

Why billionaires want to abandon the planet, and what it really means to seize the moment

From Bezos to Musk, the world’s richest men have been spinning a strange and seductive tale: Earth is just the beginning. The real frontier, the one worthy of their genius and our awe, is out there. On the Moon. On Mars. In orbit. They don’t talk about fixing the climate, restoring biodiversity, or reversing the poisoned rivers they helped fund into existence. That’s not sexy, nor scalable. That doesn’t IPO.

Instead, they promise that someday, maybe soon, we’ll live on other planets. In domes. On regolith. With breathable air imported in tanks and water wrung from rocks. The media eats it up. Techno-optimists cheer. Venture capitalists circle like vultures around a dying carcass, because that’s what the future is under capitalism: not a garden to tend, but a corpse to loot.

Elon Musk, in particular, has become capitalism’s high priest of planetary escape. His vision isn’t just about rockets, it’s about resignation. It says, essentially: Earth is too far gone, and too difficult to fix. So let’s build a new economy on Mars, free from regulation, unions, climate activists, and history. This is economic theology. And it tells us everything we need to know about capitalism’s allergy to sustainability.

The concept of Martian colonization, as Adam Becker argued on the Nerd Reich podcast, is both impractical and grotesque. Mars is a frozen, irradiated desert with no breathable atmosphere, poisonous soil and bone-crushing logistical constraints. Becker also makes a damning comparison: even the aftermath of the meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs was more hospitable to life than Mars. We know this because mammals survived it. Antarctica, in the dead of winter, is more survivable than the Red Planet. Yet no one is trying to build luxury condos on Antarctica.

It’s far easier, Becker argues, to fix Earth than to terraform a lifeless rock. But that’s not the point. The billionaires pushing interplanetary expansion don’t care that it’s wildly harder. They care that it’s profitable, at least for them.

Under capitalism, the survival of the human species isn’t the goal. The goal is returns. Repairing Earth requires cooperation, restraint, and redistribution. That’s poison to a system designed around infinite extraction and private gain. In that light, escaping Earth becomes the logical endgame: not because it’s wise, but because it allows the game to continue, just on a different board.

There is no profit motive in healing a forest. There’s no quarterly earnings bump from protecting an aquifer. But there is money, buckets of it, selling bottled water. Or in launching rockets, securing mineral rights on the Moon, and selling Martian real estate to other billionaires in case Earth becomes inconvenient.

The obsession with space isn’t visionary. It’s cowardice at escape velocity.

The real revolution isn’t in the stars. It’s in turning back to the soil beneath our feet and refusing the lie that ruin is inevitable. We don’t need to colonize a dead world. We need to stop killing the living one.

And if capitalism can’t accommodate that truth, if it sees Earth’s salvation as unprofitable, then maybe it’s not the planet that needs replacing. It’s the system.

Sustainability isn’t a lifestyle trend. It’s not a greenwashed product label or a corporate diversity goal stapled to an ESG report. At its core, sustainability simply means this:

Providing for the needs of the present without stealing from future generations.

It’s a simple principle, almost childlike in its clarity. Don’t foul the well. Don’t burn what you can’t regrow. Don’t inherit a planet and leave behind a husk.

Capitalism, by contrast, is built on theft from the future. It’s a system that treats ecosystems as assets to be stripped, illness as a revenue stream, and natural disasters as business opportunities. It doesn’t just tolerate collapse, it commodifies it.

After every wildfire, there’s a land grab. After every hurricane, a no-bid contract. After every flood, a wave of predatory lenders and displaced communities forced into privatized recovery schemes. These moments of destruction aren’t just tragic, they’re profitable. That’s what Naomi Klein famously labeled "disaster capitalism": the monetization of chaos.

The same logic applies to healthcare. Chronic illness isn’t a failure in a capitalist system, it’s a business model. The longer you're sick, the longer you’re paying. Preventive care is neglected because cures don’t pay dividends, but treatments do. Every diabetic, every cancer patient, every struggling family trying to navigate a for-profit medical system is a reminder: under capitalism, suffering is just another subscription service.

And the problem is far bigger than the system of care. It begins upstream, at the point of pollution, extraction, and deregulation. Across the United States, there are entire regions known informally as "Cancer Alley" or "Parkinson's zones", places where fossil fuel refining, petrochemical production, and pesticide exposure have poisoned the air, water, and soil to such a degree that chronic illness clusters have become generational. These aren’t isolated anomalies, they are predictable byproducts of industrial capitalism operating without guardrails.

In a rational system, the existence of these zones would be a scandal. In capitalism, they’re the cost of doing business, externalities on a balance sheet, collateral damage. Regulators don’t demand zero tolerance for harm; they negotiate how many parts per million of a known carcinogen can be "safely" released into the environment, not because that’s what the science says, but because that’s what the budget allows. Pollution thresholds are negotiated, not to protect the public, but to protect the bottom line. Meanwhile, the medical industry profits not only from treating these conditions but from the same lobbyists who defend the polluters. It’s a closed loop of harm, held together by campaign contributions and quarterly reports.

Rather than sustainable, it’s vampiric. And it’s proof that a system built on extraction, whether it’s oil, labor, forests, or human pain, can never deliver sustainability. Because the moment you stop extracting, the profits stop too.

The future will be decided by whether we confront that truth or continue selling pieces of a dying world to the highest bidder.

History is filled with moments of so-called progress that, in hindsight, read more like environmental horror stories. Decisions that were praised as visionary innovations at the time now stand as milestones in a long march toward collapse. Leaded gasoline, once lauded for eliminating engine knock, poisoned entire generations. DDT was sprayed like a miracle cure until it ravaged ecosystems. Fracking was sold as a revolution in energy independence, even as it contaminated groundwater and destabilized entire regions. Somewhere, someone signed the permit for the Deepwater Horizon rig. Someone approved uranium mines on sacred Indigenous land. Someone greenlit the gold operations that turned Colorado’s rivers toxic.

Not accidents, they were policy, literal business plans. They were decisions made in the name of profit, backed by think tanks and rubber-stamped by agencies tasked with protecting the public but funded by the fees paid by the very industry they are meant to regulate. And they were entirely logical under capitalism, a system that rewards short-term gain, ignores long-term consequences, and punishes anyone who questions the trajectory.

The result? Nearly 40% of America’s waterways are now so polluted they can no longer support healthy aquatic life. We have industrialized our rivers to death, turning once-thriving ecosystems into chemical corridors. Entire regions, from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes, have been sacrificed to the altar of economic efficiency. Fish kills, toxic algal blooms, and permanently contaminated groundwater are no longer anomalies, they’re normal. And normal, in capitalism, just means accepted.

The unsustainable logic at the heart of capitalism has deep roots, in colonial conquest, industrial revolution, and fossil fuel dependence. From the outset, capitalism was about enclosure and exploitation: privatize the commons, displace Indigenous stewards, and turn nature into inventory. Forests became timber. Rivers became power. Mountains became ore. Human labor became disposable.

What we now call the climate crisis is the inevitable outcome of centuries spent prioritizing profit over planetary limits. The coal-powered engines of 19th-century empires gave rise to oil empires of the 20th, and now, data and lithium empires in the 21st. But the logic hasn’t changed: grow, extract, consume, discard, repeat. The packaging evolves, the consequences remain.

Even the post-war era of social safety nets and environmental protections, the so-called golden age, was built on the back of global extraction. Sweatshops, coups, and foreign pipelines subsidized American prosperity. And now, with the biosphere fraying at the edges, the system is running out of runway. There’s no frontier left to plunder, only feedback loops accelerating.

Collapse is a choice, one made easier by the myth that no alternatives exist. The truth is that other models do exist, and always have. Indigenous communities across the globe have long practiced regenerative stewardship, guided by reciprocity rather than exploitation. Cooperative economics, commons-based governance, agroecology, and degrowth frameworks offer viable paths forward, not to return to the past, but to survive the future.

The pivot begins with values. Sustainability isn’t just solar panels and electric cars. It’s a cultural shift: from domination to participation, from extraction to regeneration. It means measuring success by health, resilience, and well-being, not by GDP. It means protecting water as sacred, not privatizing it and pricing it like a commodity. It means understanding that the Earth is not a warehouse. It is our only home.

This is the moment to see clearly. To shed the illusion that we can endlessly tweak the existing system and expect a different result. The climate crisis, mass extinction, chronic illness, and water scarcity aren’t glitches, they are the outputs of a system functioning exactly as designed.

To seize the moment, Carpe Momentum, means fully understanding what we are up against. It means seeing capitalism not just as an economic framework, but as an engine of unsustainability, pushing us toward planetary collapse. And it means rejecting fatalism.

Our task is not to escape to Mars or to greenwash our way through the end of the world. It is to adapt, to imagine, and to build new systems rooted in care, cooperation, and ecological balance. The path forward will not be easy, but it is necessary. And it begins with the courage to say: this system is failing.