Werner Herzog labels Elon Musk’s Mars City “an obscenity”

It’s easy to mock Elon Musk. But when someone with the cultural force and stylistic elegance of Werner Herzog offers up his own withering assessment of the Tesla CEO’s hubris, it’s worth paying attention. In a recent interview with the magazine Inverse, Herzog called Musk’s plan to build a city on Mars by 2050 “an obscenity.” Given the nonsense we’ve had to put up with from the Tesla CEO, it was a juicy bit of trivial gossip that also managed to express something profound about the problems that Musk’s wayward ambition poses.

The interview was published earlier in November as part of the filmmaker’s promotional work for his new asteroid documentary “Fireball.” However, Herzog’s comments on Musk weren’t included in the original piece. It’s only today that the Inverse team have made Herzog’s comments public. (It’s not entirely clear if there’s a specific reason for this other than harvesting Friday afternoon clicks.)

Herzog on Musk

Herzog was complimentary about some aspects of Musk’s work. Noting that he “stylizes himself as some sort of a technological visionary,” he says that it’s “wonderful” that Musk is selling “his electric cars” and “his reusable rockets.”

Moreover, he’s not even opposed to space exploration. As the Inverse writers put it, “the German filmmaker would ‘love to go [to Mars] with a camera with scientists.'” Fans of Musk or Herzog might even remember that Herzog asked the billionaire to take him to space in the 2016 film Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World.

However, it’s the colonization of space that Herzog takes particular issue with. He directs his words not only to Musk, but to all of us:

“I have to tell not only Elon Musk, but everyone. And so I say it as straightforward as it can be… it is an obscenity. The thought alone is an obscenity.”

Herzog describes Musk’s plan to build a city on Mars as the endpoint of technological utopianism. He compares it to Fascism and communism – both of which, he notes, failed.

“Our century very quickly will bring to an end technological utopia like colonizing Mars.” Herzog said. “We will end this utopia very, very quickly within this century.”

Is a city on Mars even possible?

Put simply: it’s not. The Inverse article notes that there have been a number of studies and experiments done to test its viability at a purely theoretical level, and even then things don’t look great. “Studies done on the International Space Station and Earth suggest time spent in space does have significant health consequences,” Inverse states. (This piece explains what these consequences are in more detail.)

Musk will continue on in spite of the science. His feelings really don’t care about the facts. Perhaps we should be glad that he’s doomed to failure, thankful we can avoid such an obscenity – or perhaps we should be mindful of the consequences of his ambition and how it distracts us from the more urgent (if boring) challenges that need to be solved on Earth.