You're Already an Astronaut
Every few months, a billionaire announces their plan to colonize Mars. Terraform another planet. Build a backup civilization. Save humanity by leaving.
Here's what they're missing: you're already on a spaceship.
Earth is a living vessel traveling 67,000 miles an hour around a star, which itself is whipping around the Milky Way at 490,000 miles an hour. You were born in deep space. You will die in deep space. You are, right now, hurtling through the cosmos on the most sophisticated life-support system ever known.
And we're trashing it.
The terraforming we already have
There's a terraforming project that's been running for about four billion years. It turned a molten rock into a place with rainforests, coral reefs, and soil so complex that a single teaspoon contains more microorganisms than there are humans on the planet.
We didn't build this. We can barely understand it. And we're destroying it faster than any asteroid ever could.
The people who want to terraform Mars — who think they can engineer an atmosphere, create soil, establish ecosystems from scratch on a dead rock with no magnetic field — can't even maintain the one that's already working.
The soil computer
Soil is a computer. Not metaphorically — literally. The mycelial networks in a healthy forest floor process information, allocate resources, and make decisions. The "Wood Wide Web" isn't cute science writing. It's a distributed computing network that's been running longer than anything humans have built.
Fungi trade nutrients for carbon with trees. Trees share resources with their young through root networks. Bacteria communicate through quorum sensing, adjusting behavior based on population density. It's parallel processing, resource allocation, and signal transduction — happening in the dirt beneath your feet.
And here we are, building data centers that consume lakes of water to cool the machines that train the models that tell us... what, exactly?
What the data centers cost
A single large AI training run uses as much energy as a small country. The water used to cool data centers could irrigate farms. The rare earth minerals in the GPUs were mined from places that used to be forests.
Every query you run has a cost measured in water, energy, and earth. Not a metaphorical cost — a real one. Gallons. Kilowatt-hours. Tons of displaced soil.
This isn't an argument against computing. It's an argument for honesty about what computing costs. And for asking whether what we're computing is worth what we're spending.
The astronaut's job
If you're an astronaut — and you are — your job isn't to find a new ship. Your job is to maintain this one.
Check the air. Check the water. Check the soil. Tend the systems that keep the crew alive. That's not romantic. That's not exciting. That's what real space exploration looks like.
Not rockets. Not Mars. Not escape velocity.
Compost. Cover crops. Regenerative grazing. Mycelial networks. The boring, invisible, essential work of keeping a four-billion-year-old life-support system running.
The most advanced piece of technology on Earth isn't in a server rack. It's in the first six inches of healthy topsoil.