Continued closure of the strait risks sinking the global economy into a prolonged economic depression. Oil and natural gas make up 58 percent of all global energy consumption—for electricity, transportation, and heating alike. The region around the Persian Gulf produces 31 percent of the world’s crude oil and 18 percent of the world’s natural gas, furthermore accounting for 42 percent of all global oil exports and 27 percent of all global liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Oil and gas are also irreplaceable basic chemical inputs in manufacturing and modern agriculture. Before the war, the strait saw roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply pass through it every day.

A global economic depression of this scale would wind up defining the Trump administration’s legacy, and in the most negative possible way—plummeting stock markets, skyrocketing prices, rising unemployment, and unpredictable shortages. It would all but guarantee a Democratic Party victory in the 2028 U.S. presidential election. The parallels to President George W. Bush’s second term are easy to draw: interminable Middle Eastern wars of choice and a sudden economic crisis see the Republican president leave office with record-breakingly low approval ratings. His designated successor is trounced in the election by a charismatic Democrat promising economic relief to the common man.

It would be not just Trump personally who is discredited and demoralized, but his political allies too and the entire populist current that he symbolizes, not just in America but internationally. Populist politics are a lost cause if populist leaders accidentally cause as much damage to their constituents’ interests as establishment leaders cause intentionally.

The Strait of Hormuz is nonetheless something of a red herring when it comes to understanding and expeditiously resolving this conflict. The core problem is not maritime administration, but one that receives far less attention in news headlines and incredulous commentary than it deserves: Iran’s extremely efficient, robust, and technologically advanced military-industrial base, which is what has allowed Iran to consistently bomb the entire region, seemingly at will, for the last five months.

Iran Has the Upper Hand in Military Technology

When pundits or journalists do discuss Iran’s military-industrial base, it is framed as “Iran’s missile and drone arsenal”—as if Iran has a set number of drones and missiles that it will eventually run out of, and, after all, since we all know that Iran is a Third World economic basket case, it must have somehow acquired these advanced weapons in an improper way anyhow, and so the ineffable universe will conspire to eventually rid Iran of its advanced weapons programs in a manner we cannot quite predict but are certain must happen.

All of this is dangerously misguided and wishful thinking, downstream of a general bias to think that the U.S. military cannot ever be technologically out-innovated. Precision-guided, long-range bombs capable of evading air defenses—whether in the form of ballistic missiles, fixed-wing drones, or anything else—used to be the kind of technological marvel upon which U.S. global military supremacy rested, easily defeating the rinky-dink armies of tinpot dictatorships relying on goose-stepping infantrymen and Soviet tanks.

Unfortunately, this technological marvel has been commoditized. Due to the same processes that have caused globalization, deindustrialization in the developed world, and economic growth in the developing world, the U.S. is no longer the only country capable of firing missiles over thousands of kilometers with deadly accuracy. Over the decades, industrial expertise has slowly and inevitably diffused past the borders of the U.S.-aligned world, especially to China, making what were previously advanced mechanical and electronic components and materials far more commonplace, affordable, and replicable.

Just as crucially, recognizing its own strategic and military limitations, Iran has aggressively pursued technological progress in drones and missiles for decades, with the ultimate result today that it has altered the fundamental balance of military power between the Iranian armed forces and their U.S.-equipped adversaries. Iran has not improperly acquired advanced technology, in fact it rather deserves the credit for inventing and popularizing the low-cost, fixed-wing, one-way attack drone through its Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 models, which have since been directly imitated not just by the Russian and Chinese militaries, but the U.S. military too. It is a rare thing for a heavily-sanctioned developing country to innovate a military technology that is then quickly validated through imitation by all of the world’s military superpowers.

By the same token, many people would likely be surprised to find out that Iran has a functional space program that first successfully launched an Iranian-made satellite into orbit on an Iranian-made rocket in 2009; a technological milestone that Iran attained before Italy or South Korea did. Iran has reportedly relied on Russian and Chinese satellite intelligence for its strikes—but since 2020 it has also added its own military reconnaissance satellites to orbit.

As of yet, no reliable countermeasures to Iran’s plentiful drones and missiles have been developed, nor are likely to be developed without at least several more years of experimentation, manufacturing expansion, and major cost reductions. The technology is simply still too new for countermeasures to have developed and diffused.

As a result, as hard as it may be to believe for our aging policymakers and defense planners—and doubtlessly for those of Israel or the United Arab Emirates too—the days when being the proud owner of an American-made jet fighter or missile system would all but guarantee a small country’s deterrence against larger foes are over. In a fundamental way, the cause of the stalemate in the ongoing conflict is that the developed world’s technological stagnation, deindustrialization, and institutional sclerosis have allowed Iran rather than Ohio to jump ahead and be the first to mass-produce the weapons of the future.

The Strait of Hormuz was an afterthought when bombs began dropping on the 28th of February. Rather, the conflict hinges on Iran’s newfound military-technological edge, which Iran is flexing not just by bombing ships in the strait, but by bombing ships outside the strait, bombing ports and refineries, bombing oil pipelines, bombing military bases, bombing U.S. Navy warships, bombing Israel, and by giving Iranian proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen the same weapons to carry out bombing campaigns of their own.

This is of course why proposals to “circumvent” the Iranian threat to the Strait of Hormuz with new oil pipelines or maritime routes are so farcical. Iran’s drones and missiles, to state the obvious, can strike targets on land or sea for thousands of kilometers in whatever direction. You cannot move the entire oil-producing Persian Gulf region outside the range of Iranian bombs. Although it may incrementally degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities, you cannot fully eliminate the threat by “only” bombing or capturing Iranian targets on the coast, since drone launchers can be easily moved around and both drones and missiles can be launched from deep inland.

Proposals to simply “take out” Iran’s drone and missile arsenal are only somewhat less farcical. The industrial infrastructure necessary to mass-produce drones and missiles does not depend on two or three top-secret military sites that can be cleanly targeted, in the way that a nuclear weapons program might depend. Shahed-style drones in particular have been nicknamed “flying lawnmowers” because of the buzzing sound their cheap engines make—engines which are identical in design, and not even that far off in horsepower, from lawnmower engines.

Iran is a relatively industrialized country of 93 million people that is the size of Alaska and just as mountainous. To remove such a large country’s ability to do something as basic as manufacture lawnmowers would require a brutal years-long bombing campaign on the scale of Allied bombing of Nazi Germany in World War II—and this is ignoring the fact that Iran has already intentionally tried to fortify its military-industrial base against disruption from the air by locating key production and storage facilities deep underground.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to eliminate Iran’s military-technological edge in drones and missiles fast enough to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force. This means all routes to ending the conflict while avoiding economic disaster will require negotiating with Iran, which will require conceding to Iran some or other things it wants.

What Iran Wants

What Iran wants in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz is, for better or worse, a wider-ranging wishlist than just tolls on ships. Perhaps contrary to many casual observers’ assumptions, Iran did not apparently welch on its promises in June because of any unforeseen and irresolvable dispute over the strait. Rather, Iranian military authorities cited “the United States’ clear breach of its commitments regarding the first article of the memorandum of understanding on ending the war,” specifically the “continuous and relentless violations of the ceasefire by [Israel] in southern Lebanon” and the “failure of the occupying [Israeli] forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon.” The first article called for the “immediate and permanent termination” of warfare “on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” by the U.S., Iran, and “their allies.”

In other words, Iran wishes to use its leverage over the strait to preserve the existence of Hezbollah, the well-armed Lebanese Shia militia and designated terrorist group which has intermittently attacked Israel for years and which, since recent Israeli counterattacks, has become more of a de facto arm of the Iranian military than ever before. The Lebanese government has been formally undertaking the process of disarming Hezbollah since 2025, although expert consensus remains that the Lebanese government ultimately lacks the coherence or state capacity to succeed at this goal.

Why Iran cares at all about Hezbollah—or, for that matter, Israel—is a commonsense question without a commonsense answer. In short and simplified terms, Iran’s regime is a revolutionary Shia theocracy that derives its legitimacy in substantial part from its founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s promise to export the revolution to the rest of the Middle East and thereby expel what it perceives as foreign, infidel meddlers in Muslim civilization, namely the U.S. and Israel. The theocracy’s domestic hold on power depends on the perception that it is taking the fight to the enemy and defending the prestige of Iran and Islam; it is why Iran fought the bloody Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s for years after it made any sense to continue, in an ultimately futile attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install an Iraqi Shia theocracy.

This interventionist streak, even if put on ice, is indeed a persistent source of instability and conflict in the region and the reason Iran has consistently supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various other proxy groups. Unfortunately, the theocratic regime has proved highly robust against attempts to change it, whether through mobilization of the Iranian people or through direct attacks. It is difficult to see how the decision to assassinate Iran’s leadership at the start of the war, including the sitting Iranian Supreme Leader who holds a religious status akin to the Pope in addition to his temporal powers, was not a blunder borne out of plain misunderstanding of the clerical, bureaucratic, and decentralized nature of the Iranian regime. Iran’s bureaucracies have simply replaced their lost leadership with equally or even more rigid successors, as any half-decent bureaucracy is designed to do.

Removing the Iranian regime by force would require a massive ground invasion utilizing millions of troops that would take years and have no guarantee of ultimate success, but would certainly guarantee hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and a possibly multi-decade economic depression, as Iran would indiscriminately retaliate against all energy infrastructure in the Gulf as well as against Israeli civilian targets. Invading Iran may be a moot point anyway, as it is now unclear whether the U.S. military would even be able to equip a capable ground force or stage it to invade without suffering prohibitively high casualties.

Hezbollah is in practice an extension of the revolutionary Iranian military. If neither Israel nor Lebanon are capable of totally and rapidly uprooting Hezbollah, then the only realistic path to avoiding an economic depression in the short term is to allow both Iran and Israel to save face from what is effectively a military stalemate between them in Lebanon. For example, one possibility is that Israel could withdraw from the areas of Lebanon it currently occupies while leaving the Lebanese military in control, with assistance from United Nations-coordinated military forces from third countries.

However, in exchange, Iran would have to order Hezbollah to remain proactively—if tacitly—disarmed in those areas, respect the authority of the Lebanese government, and refrain from otherwise attacking or provoking Israel. Both Hezbollah and Israel could thereby claim victory while for the most part returning to the status quo ante bellum. Israel and Iran will not communicate diplomatically, but both can communicate with the U.S. government, which would have to take up the role of a guarantor and intermediary.

What Iran would receive in exchange for this restraint is what it realistically most desperately needs: economic relief. Much like “sanctions relief for nuclear restraint” has remained the unavoidable dynamic in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, “economic relief for bombing restraint” is going to remain the unavoidable dynamic in negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz or any other issue. The precise details will be left up to the negotiators to determine, but fundamentally the U.S. has many carrots with which to entice Iran, including sanctions relief on oil exports, unfreezing Iranian funds held abroad, and coordinating direct investment or reconstruction funds. All of these things were, of course, part of the Islamabad Memorandum. A peace deal with Iran that allowed the world to buy Iranian oil and gas, even only in the short run, would ironically go a long way towards averting economic disaster.

The apparently thorniest problem is Iran’s sometimes vague but insistent demand for some form of control over the Strait of Hormuz, which appears to be impossible to satisfy without violating international maritime law. This problem is however not as thorny as it looks: let it be noted that between a global economic depression and a violation of the sanctity of international law, the former is far worse and less common and, let it also be noted that, in fact, neither the United States nor Iran are actually parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Nor are the United Arab Emirates or Israel.

Iran appears to want two things from the strait. First, money. The $20-40 billion in annual fees it expects could be collected from transiting vessels is roughly a tenth of the country’s GDP, and would go straight into the government’s coffers with little additional effort required. Iran is aware that unilaterally violating international maritime law to charge illegal tolls would be a highly unpopular action amongst its many trade partners, so it has repeatedly floated proposals such as joint control or responsibility for the strait with Oman and perhaps other Gulf states, charging “fees for services” or some other such euphemism instead. This would also likely violate international maritime law, but in a more acceptable and sustainable manner.

There is undoubtedly a way to craft a basically internationally acceptable protocol for charging minimal fees from transits through the strait. As Trump has occasionally suggested, perhaps even the U.S. government should get a cut. The latest proposals being reported on suggest Iran and Oman have agreed to manage shipping through the strait bilaterally, with Iran managing inbound traffic and Oman managing outbound traffic. After an initial period of free passage, Iran will apparently impose fees on ships for safe navigation and possibly charge much higher fees for U.S. or Israeli-linked ships as a form of war reparations.

Second, Iran also likely wants the ability to shut down the strait to pressure the U.S. in the case of future conflict with Israel, but in a legitimate and internationally-recognized way without creating the economic and diplomatic headaches of actually launching bombs that target neutral ships or countries. The idea of giving Iran any formal power or influence to close perhaps the most important global shipping lane is anathema to U.S. policymakers. Unfortunately, the harsh truth is that if we didn’t want to give Iran any influence over shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, we should have thought about that before blowing up their leadership in the exact way they warned would trigger them to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has already objectively proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it has the power to shut down the strait—formalizing realities can be embarrassing and painful, but in the long run never worse than ignoring them. The 1936 Montreux Convention which governs Turkey’s control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, which connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, is a precedent for recognizing Iran’s at least partial influence over the Strait of Hormuz. The convention allows Turkey to charge minimal fees for passage to maintain maritime infrastructure and to close the passage if Turkey feels threatened.

The goal of U.S. negotiators ought to be to craft a maximally watered-down version of a convention or multinational authority that still includes Iran as a recognized partner in the strait. Recent reports indicate the Trump administration is inclined to accept the latest Iran-Oman plans. Their inclination is likely the correct move and any potential deals should not be scuttled simply due to the perceived sanctity of international maritime law.

Excepting the Strait of Hormuz from the principle of freedom of navigation will not have catastrophic knock-on effects for global shipping or trade, because it is a wholly unique chokepoint. There is no comparable passage where the entire planet depends on the valuable commodities continuously exiting it, namely oil and gas. It is furthermore the only such major chokepoint that cannot just be physically circumvented by a ship.

Modern maritime shipping is extremely cheap and flexible and will only become more so as Chinese shipbuilding continues to grow. It is not the 16th century anymore, when any transoceanic voyage was a life-or-death coin-flip, nor even the 19th century where the opening of the Suez Canal was a significant military and economic achievement. Modern cargo ships regularly and nonchalantly travel long oceanic routes that would have been considered heroic in centuries past, spending the vast majority of their time in international waters far from any shore rather than territorial waters.

When the Houthis shut down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait from 2023 to 2025, nobody would have known without reading the news because it is so trivial for modern ships to ignore any restricted route and just reroute their journeys the long way around, even if the new route adds thousands of kilometers and weeks of time to the trip. Egypt closed the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975, with the outcome that nobody today even remembers it happened because cargo ships just began going around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa instead.

This means that the leverage of any countries which could conceivably shut down another maritime passage is simply not comparable to Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. If Indonesia, for example, tried to charge tolls for passage through the Malacca Strait, or even through any of its territorial waters, cargo ships would simply avoid the entire Indonesian archipelago, and go past Australia and around Papua New Guinea instead. At worst, the violation of the principle of freedom of navigation might inspire some countries to attempt to renegotiate their own transit or maritime policies. None of these headaches would present remotely as much of a global economic crisis as Iran.

Iran, of course, also depends on transit through the strait to export its own oil and gas and import goods from abroad. Rather than make any concessions to Iran, many would prefer to play the game of economic chicken and bet that the Iranian regime will collapse under a sustained blockade, even if global economic turmoil occurs in the meantime. The problem is that there is no tight relationship between impoverishment and regime change. It took nearly fourteen years for the far more brittle and embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria—a far smaller and less well-resourced country than Iran—to collapse under the weight of economic desolation.

There is no reason to think that even an Iran actively embroiled in civil war would be unable to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut and land strikes on energy infrastructure in the Gulf. An ideological regime feeling existentially threatened might even lash out harder at civilian infrastructure, like power plants or the few water desalination plants in the Gulf countries and Israel that provide drinking water for most of the population. Or, worse, rush to build and use a nuclear bomb. Fourteen years of war with Iran might finally sink the regime, but at the cost of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and possibly currently unthinkable human devastation in the Gulf states and Israel.

Reindustrialize, Electrify, and Drill to Defeat Iran

The path to defeating the Iranian regime’s interventionist ambitions lies in countering or neutralizing Iran’s military-technological edge in drones and missiles. This will take years, not weeks or months, but must be done regardless of the short-term outcome of the war. One of the key reasons to want to avoid a long war and global economic disaster, in fact, is that this would make it harder to take on the deeper industrial and technological challenges that must be overcome in order to shift the balance of power against Iran.

To begin with, in purely military terms, the reason that the U.S., Israeli, and Gulf Arab militaries are not capable of defeating or deterring Iran is that Iran’s weapons are just better than ours. They are cheaper and easier to produce in large numbers, whereas our weapons are more expensive and harder to produce in large numbers, with the result that Iran’s weapons get past our weapons. On a further note, Iran has already adapted to this new “meta” of mass drone warfare by burying so many of its key facilities underground, whereas we have not and keep all of our military and industrial facilities above-ground. 

After just five months of war, the U.S. military is reportedly literally running out of ammunition to keep fighting Iran: the pre-war stockpile of 2200 Patriot missiles and 452 THAAD missiles to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles has been depleted to just 827 and 278 respectively; depleting your missile defenses by 62% in a few months is a completely unsustainable rate. Gulf allies have fared even worse: Saudi Arabia has reportedly depleted 86% of its stockpiled Patriot PAC-3 interceptors since February.

Incumbent defense contractors are unlikely to replenish these stockpiles quickly enough to make up the shortfall, let alone develop new and cheaper drone and missile interceptors. The Pentagon could instead direct these defense contractors to undertake internal reforms for efficiency and volume production, while also introducing new competition from defense startups like Anduril and Ukrainian defense companies which are closer to the practical cutting edge of modern warfare. The U.S. military has already procured thousands of Merops drones from Ukraine, small drones that are used to destroy Shahed-style drones in flight. The goal should be to have a stockpile of millions of such drones, which ought to be enough to neutralize the threat of Iranian drones across the Middle East.

The industrial base of the U.S.-aligned developed world is far larger than Iran’s. It is only institutional inertia and dysfunction that has allowed Iran to jump ahead in drone technology. In principle, in a war of drone and missile volume, Iran should be easily outgunned by the U.S. and its allies. China, for its part, is not particularly interested in assisting Iran’s interventionist foreign policy, so would not be expected to shift its tremendous industrial weight in Iran’s favor.

Iran’s leverage can also be neutralized by reducing the global economy’s dependence on oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. There are two ways to do this: first, drill for more oil and gas anywhere else in the world and, second, replace more fossil fuel-powered technology with electrically-powered technology. The false dichotomy of drilling for oil and gas and driving gas-guzzling cars versus transitioning to a “green,” low-energy economy of solar panels, windmills, and electric vehicles must be discarded. The goal must be energy abundance and independence, which means drilling, fracking, and coal mining are cheerfully pursued alongside nuclear power plants, solar photovoltaic farms, and fleets of self-driving electric taxis.

Defense reform, reindustrialization, electrification, and resource extraction will not allow the U.S. and its allies to pressure Iran into a favorable peace deal in the short term. But, intelligently and vigorously pursued, such policies would erode Iran’s current military-technological edge and shift the balance of power decisively away from Iran in possibly as little as five or ten years. Importantly, they would far outweigh any benefits the Iranian regime would gain from financial windfalls in the meantime. For a conflict that has already dragged on for nearly fifty years, this would in hindsight be a brief blip in the improvement of Iranian fortunes.

Now is not the time to be thinking short-term. A failed game of economic chicken with Iran could easily lock the Western world into a generation of economically redistributionist politics indifferent to the fates of U.S. allies in the Middle East, and uninterested in taking any measures to improve the military or industrial capacities of the developed world.

In the eyes of economists, this is simply the magic of comparative advantage in trade at work. The Arabs were blessed with oil, the Germans with a work ethic, and the inhabitants of the Mediterranean with perhaps the world’s most comfortable climate and most beautiful coastline. Late last year, The Economist even called Spain the best economy in the developed world, with Greece not far behind. Why should it matter how a country earns a living, if GDP keeps going up?

The problem is that, to a first approximation, no country has ever reached the ranks of the global wealthiest countries by relying primarily on tourism and, moreover, many countries highly dependent on tourism remain very poor. Jamaica, Bali, the Maldives, and Fiji are globally recognizable, name-brand destinations that are as or even more dependent on tourism than Southern Europe. All four are also unenviably poor by European standards, despite having small or even tiny populations to share in the incoming tourism money.

The apparent or actual exceptions do not detract much from this picture. Macao is China’s Las Vegas, on steroids. Andorra is a small patch of land between France and Spain which is not part of the European Union and therefore does not levy sales taxes on alcohol, tobacco, perfume, and other goods—like an airport duty-free zone. Monaco is a sovereign neighborhood of a mid-sized French city populated by some of the world’s wealthiest people. Bermuda, Malta, Cyprus, and others are financial hubs as much as or more than they are tourism hotspots. Importantly, all of these states are also tiny in terms of population: the largest is Cyprus, with 1.3 million people, while Andorra, Bermuda, and Monaco have truly miniscule populations of less than 90,000 people each. Whatever works for idiosyncratic micro-states is unlikely to work for much larger states of five or ten million people, let alone fifty million or more.

Tourism is not a path to prosperity for Southern Europe or likely any nation with a more than trivial population because of the very nature of the activity: for a relatively limited financial reward, it is intensive in both labor and capital while being effectively a zero-sum competition between countries—in which any given country has very limited ability to compete through ingenuity or differentiation—all the while having pretty much only cascading negative externalities on the rest of the economy and society, from overcrowding cities to disincentivizing skilled labor. By my calculations, tourism grew as a share of the economy in all the main Southern European countries from 1999 to 2019. But rather than a new potential vector of economic dynamism and growth, rising tourism is a flashing red emergency siren, a sign of an economy that is failing at everything else.

The Math Does Not Add Up

Croatia is a small Mediterranean country with a winding coastline, plentiful islands, warm and crystal-clear seawater, and a central location reached easily from anywhere in Europe. Nowadays, it is trendy with young tourists and, as the newest EU member state, is still on the economic upswing. If any country in Southern Europe could get rich from tourism, it would be Croatia. How many tourist arrivals would be necessary for Croatia to achieve the GDP per capita of Switzerland, one of the wealthiest countries in the world?

The GDP per capita i.e. annual income per person of Switzerland is roughly $100,000 per year. The population of Croatia is 3.86 million people. To be as rich as Switzerland, Croatia would need $386 billion in income. The average tourist in Croatia reportedly spends about $200 per day. Therefore, to get as rich as Switzerland but solely from tourism, Croatia would need its tourists to spend 1.93 billion nights in the country each year. In 2024, international tourists spent only 85 million nights in the country. That is just 4% of the necessary figure, meaning the tourism sector would need to grow more than twenty times over. If all these billions of necessary tourist-nights were crammed into the traditional three-month summer “tourist season,” Croatia would need to simultaneously host 21.4 million tourists each day of each summer. This is over twenty times the current population of Croatia’s coastal regions.

These 85 million tourist-nights came from 17.4 million tourist arrivals. Assuming the same ratio holds, this would imply a need for Croatia to have 395 million tourist arrivals per year. This is more than the entire population of the United States visiting each year and four times more than the current figure for international tourist arrivals of France, the world leader. The physical infrastructure for Croatia to accommodate hundreds of millions of new tourists, outnumbering the locals ten or twenty to one every summer, does not exist. Forget hotels and Airbnbs—whole new towns and cities would need to be built. The roads do not exist. The airports do not exist. The power plants do not exist. The sewage systems do not exist. The capital investment, state capacity, and elite competence to build anything more than minor incremental expansions do not exist.

Moreover, the low-wage service workforce that would be demanded by such a colossal number of tourists does not exist. Croatia reportedly employs around 150,000 people in the tourism sector. If the number of tourists grew twenty-fold, so would, presumably, the number of workers in tourism, meaning the country would need some 3.4 million service workers in total. This is double the entire current Croatian labor force of 1.7 million people, which is moreover declining due to emigration, aging, and low fertility. Even if every last Croatian alive today worked in tourism, the country would still need to import an additional 1.7 million low-wage foreign laborers to hit the target, who would then make up a solid 30% of the new population and, of course, put the target of reaching Swiss GDP per capita still further out of reach.

Most importantly of all, the tourists who would pay for all this do not exist: in 2024, there were 1.4 billion tourist arrivals globally. For Croatia to have 395 million tourist arrivals would be 28% of global tourism market share, up from about 1% today. Even if the global tourism sector doubled in some future span of time, it is all but literally impossible that a small and undifferentiated country like Croatia would grow its market share more than ten times over, especially since the vast majority of new future tourists are likely to be Asians in Asia who will prefer to vacation closer to home, without first subjecting themselves to a twelve-hour flight. There is no shortage of sunny beaches in the world.

Even the more incrementalist, less ambitious version of the math does not add up. To reach Germany’s more modest GDP per capita of $56,000, Croatia would need a GDP of $216 billion. If we subtract Croatia’s existing GDP of $93 billion, that leaves us with a shortfall of $123 billion to be made up through tourism. If we optimistically and baselessly assume every additional tourist will spend $400 per day, like in Portugal, Croatia would need an additional 308 million tourist-nights, meaning it would need to quintuple the size of the current tourism sector while doubling the average spending per tourist. Spreading these tourists out across six rather than three months, we are imagining an additional 1.7 million tourists in the country each day of the spring and summer; the current 85 million annual tourist-nights spread across six months amount to around 472,000 tourists each day.

Growing a relatively mature tourism sector five times over is easier said than done: in the 37 years between the Yugoslav tourism peak of 1987 and 2024, Croatia’s total annual international tourist-nights grew by only about 40%, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of below 1%. It is true that these years saw a war, global financial crisis, and pandemic. But so what? Tourism is easily and deeply negatively affected by regional and global events that the tourism sector has no control over and almost as little ability to adapt around. That is the nature of the business. Any honest economic accounting must factor in this major disadvantage of betting on tourism, which is not true to nearly the same extent in, for example, manufacturing or finance. What are the chances of having no more recessions, wars, pandemics, or other crises in the coming decades?

Regardless, no matter how one massages the numbers, one can at best argue for a roughly 5% annual growth rate for unmolested Croatian tourism, which means it would take a perfect, uninterrupted streak of 32 years to get as rich from tourism, in the year 2057, as Germany is today. It is worth noting that, in the Croatian context, to endorse this plan is to admit Croatia is a failed country: thirty years after the fall of communism and a hard-won national independence, instead of celebrating Croatia’s economic convergence with Germany, we would be delaying it another thirty years into the future. By which time, of course, Germany is likely to have pulled further ahead.

In the end, even this mediocre outcome would still be an unjustifiably optimistic scenario. Peak tourism may have already passed Southern Europe by. Since 2019, hotel and restaurant prices in Croatia have surged by a whopping 50% and tourist arrivals have continued to slowly grow, but inflation has been so bad that the real earnings of the tourism sector are reportedly actually down almost 10% compared to 2019. This is, moreover, despite rapidly importing nearly 100,000 low-wage foreign laborers from across not just the Balkans but as far afield as India, Nepal, and the Philippines since roughly 2021, shattering a long-standing taboo on mass immigration and, to a tourist’s eyes, turning every waiter, cook, and driver in the country into a Third World migrant overnight. If Croatia cannot get rich from tourism, the rest of Southern Europe definitely cannot either.

Tourism Generates Limited and Unreliable Economic Surplus

A country becomes wealthy in much the same way that a business becomes profitable and valuable: it produces things that other people want, charges a price higher than the cost of production, and pockets the difference as profit, thus becoming wealthier. Compared to a typical company, countries only have a much more convoluted and politically contested system for deciding how to spend and distribute economic surplus—the national profit—coming into the country. This model starts to break down when considering countries or economic blocs large enough to sustain most if not all of the industries and technologies of the modern world on their own, without relying significantly on exports or imports. But for small and even medium-sized countries, it is as simple a model as one can use. Qatar is rich because it exports valuable natural gas. Denmark is rich because it exports valuable pharmaceuticals. Taiwan is rich because it exports valuable semiconductors.

The main exception to this rule is finance, which at least partially accounts for the wealth of small countries ranging from Singapore to Ireland. Countries can differentiate themselves by providing superior quality of governance for the financial activities and assets of both individuals and corporations. Economic surplus is then generated by charging fees, levying taxes, and seeking rents on the disproportionately large foreign capital a country attracts. This strategy is not as easy as shuffling paperwork, but relies on the government of a small country being strong enough to prevent domestic instability or over-extraction, as well as diplomatically skilled enough to avoid incurring the wrath of larger and more powerful states whose capital it is siphoning off. It is no coincidence that Switzerland and Singapore both make a point of military self-sufficiency and international neutrality.

By this logic, tourism can, of course, make a country wealthier, since tourism profit is national economic surplus. The problem is that compared to manufacturing, resource extraction, or finance, tourism is a much weaker, more limited, and unreliable engine for generating surplus. By definition, a country only becomes richer if it somehow generates more economic value per person. In economics, labor productivity is the measure of the amount of valuable output generated per worker-hour. For a country to become wealthy, it must have economic sectors and industries with high enough labor productivity for the country’s population as a whole to benefit, either directly through employment in or downstream of these sectors and industries, or indirectly through customary or government-led redistribution of surplus, such as through, say, Nordic-style social democracy or generous employment of native citizens in government jobs in the Arab Gulf states.

Something like finance faces effectively no natural limits to productivity, only social and political ones: there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents a single person from managing the wealth of all other 8 billion people on the planet, let alone Singapore managing the wealth of half of Asia. This makes finance a potentially great way to be highly productive. The main limitation of this strategy is that it is a zero-sum competition, since any wealth managed in Singapore is wealth that is not managed in China, Dubai, Switzerland, or Manhattan. It also means not every country can become rich from finance at the same time.

Wealth from resource extraction depends on the demand for the resource and, for a geographically small country, its luckiness to be blessed with large deposits. In the modern world, generally the only natural resource valuable enough to make a country rich from extracting it has been energy—oil and natural gas. Hence the wealthiness of countries ranging from Norway to Brunei. But diamonds in Botswana and copper in Chile have also helped those countries get wealthier than their neighbors.

There is another strategy that does not depend on zero-sum competition or luck: the greatest and most reliable method for increasing labor productivity in history has been industrial manufacturing, constantly improving labor productivity through superior technology, practices, and logistics. It is this positive-sum method which created the modern world and which has allowed not just a few small countries to become rich, but many large countries. Industry and manufacturing are what have allowed the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, and many more to become wealthy countries today. Their continued industrial and scientific effort underwrites the wealth of every other country on the planet.

In comparison, the ceiling of labor productivity in tourism is laughably low. A single asset management firm can manage trillions of dollars in capital. A single oilfield can produce trillions of dollars in petroleum. A single factory can manufacture trillions of dollars worth of complex technological goods. But what can a single hotel, bar, or restaurant do? A water park? In tourism, productivity is effectively the same as it was in the time of the Pharaohs. Cooking meals, serving drinks, making beds, and cleaning toilets is labor-intensive and has proven deeply resistant to productivity gains from automation and new technology. This is undoubtedly partially because part of the very appeal of tourism is to be temporarily pampered by servants.

The inputs to tourism are difficult to scale and face hard limits. Each additional tourist in a country requires additional real estate, infrastructure, and service labor to be devoted to tourism, for accommodation and entertainment. In the limit, a country only has so many walkable cities, nice beaches, and fascinating attractions, and it cannot acquire more. Croatia is not going to invade Montenegro to secure the valuable revenue streams of Serbian tourists vacationing in Budva. The presence of tourists in such places also hits diminishing returns very quickly, as both tourists and locals lose value from overcrowding and the loss of authenticity. Scaling tourism requires absurdities like planning to shuffle hundreds of millions of people through medieval towns designed to house a few thousand. This dynamic is the opposite of what happens in finance, resource extraction, or manufacturing, which all benefit from effectively unbounded economies of scale.

On paper, tourism could be scaled with quality of tourist rather than quantity. Yet there are perhaps not enough millionaires and billionaires in the world to fund more than a single and very small country this way, like Macao. Perhaps one dense urban core full of high-stakes gambling, five-star hotels, and expensive prostitutes is enough for the world. Tourism cannot even scale to being a dynamic industry the whole year round, since tourists overwhelmingly take trips for short periods in the summer. Many industries in history have used persuasive marketing and lobbying campaigns to increase demand for their goods and services, but there is virtually no hope that the tourism lobbies of Southern Europe will succeed at convincing the corporations of the world to implement three months of annual vacation per employee.

A manufacturing workforce is one in which everyone, almost regardless of their skills or intelligence, is trained in difficult and complex technical work, from the plumbers to the lead engineers. This makes them skilled laborers, higher-value human capital. They are more valuable not just because they are useful, but because they are more adaptable to new industries in case of vigorous competition from abroad, new technologies that make the old industry obsolete, or plain old wars, pandemics, and other crises. A trained workforce even makes rare scientific and technical breakthroughs more likely, like Ozempic in Denmark or chip foundries in Taiwan. In tourism, your workforce just remains unskilled and underemployed forever. A tourism-based economy is really one composed of a class of unskilled real estate rentiers and a much larger class of low-wage servant labor. Being a servant, cook, or bartender sucks. But, frankly, so does being a landlord or restaurant owner. There are better and more rewarding professions for nations to pursue.

Southern Europe Needs Quality Governance and Competitive Industry

The Mediterranean countries are often lumped together by outsiders as lazy and unproductive. In reality, they are very heterogeneous: Italy is a great power of manufacturing less economically reliant on tourism than the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, with the second-largest manufacturing economy in Europe after Germany. Greece, in contrast, was for decades effectively a nation-level scheme to defraud foreign investors. Spain and the others lie somewhere in-between, though far closer to Italy than pre-2008 Greece. What these countries share today, however, are a list of similar negative trends: rapidly aging populations, collapsing birth rates, insolvent pension systems, uncompetitive industries, inflexible governance, and, worst of all, the emigration of young and educated natives, especially to other countries in the EU.

As these problems worsen, tourism becomes more appealing to business leaders, politicians, and policy-makers: although workers can emigrate, property cannot, and low-wage labor can easily be imported from abroad to service tourists from wealthier countries. Tourism can become the success story of the new economy, providing a hopeful, winning narrative to a voter base increasingly composed of aging landlords. But it is really just a way to temporarily ameliorate the financial stress caused by deeper economic and cultural problems that remain unsolved.

Governments should therefore not try to encourage a tourism-based economy with construction subsidies, expensive infrastructure targeted at tourists, low-wage immigration, or other such policies, all of which will either do nothing to solve the underlying issues or even make them worse. No extant European government is likely to solve the global problem of falling fertility, though some such as Hungary have tried without lasting success. But whatever funds and state capacity are left ought to be instead targeted at making domestic industries more competitive, seeding wholly new industries led by young entrepreneurs, reducing tax and entitlement burdens even to the displeasure of elderly voters, and repatriating young and skilled emigrants by any means necessary. It is progress in these directions, not the number of tourists arriving on RyanAir flights, which will give Southern Europe a chance of converging with its northern neighbors this century and reviving a prestige going back to the times of the ancient world.

No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings, of which South Korea currently manages to produce only about 0.75 per woman, one of the lowest, least productive rates in the world. At this rate, in three generations, the newest generation of South Koreans would be 96% smaller than the current one. A future South Korea of 5 million rather than 50 million people is highly unlikely to be as exceptionally industrially productive as it is today.

The systems of both material and social technology we rely on to deliver our modern standards of living explicitly and implicitly assume large and growing populations, including to make many crucial economies of scale viable. They were neither designed nor intended to function with rapidly aging and declining populations. South Korea isn’t as great an outlier as it might seem. The U.S. generation of three generations from now would be 47% smaller than the current one at current fertility rates, and China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union are all worse off than that.

Why global fertility rates have widely, structurally declined to below replacement since the 19th century is a question that, still, nobody has a decisively persuasive answer to. But it is difficult not to tie the trend, somehow, to the inner workings or consequences of the unprecedented industrial societies we have built in roughly the same period. A rising supply of energetic human labor, not just physical but also mental, clerical, and intellectual, has always been a key prerequisite to and driver of industrial and technological progress. Without industrial production, there is no technological capability to speak of, no abundance of wealth, and no mass prosperity.

Slipping Down Into a Dark Age

Even if birth rates in industrialized countries magically recovered overnight, a great degree of aging and population shrinkage is already baked in. Even if this baked-in amount proves not to be outright ruinous, even if some industrial societies manage to muddle along with roughly equivalent populations and standards of living, this outcome would negate the legitimizing narrative of continuous progress and probably foreclose on achieving ambitious dreams like colonizing the Solar System or achieving untold material abundance for the whole world this century. By default, it looks like industrial civilization is abolishing itself.

A common rebuttal is that advances in automation and artificial intelligence have made human labor obsolete, so there is no need to worry about a graying and shrinking humanity, since robots will inevitably take over where humans cannot and, even, do a better job. There are two problems with this argument. First, while automation is a replacement for human labor at the level of a single factory, at the level of a civilization it is not a replacement for human labor, but a force multiplier. A society with a billion workers and a high degree of automation is extremely likely to be far wealthier and more technologically capable than not just a society with a billion workers and a low degree of automation, but also a society of one hundred million and an equal degree of automation. If we conceive of artificial intelligence as a form of automation for mental, clerical, or intellectual labor, the exact same logic applies. The purpose of automation is not inherently to mitigate the negative effects of demographic decline; defining it that way is a cope. The greatest period of automation in history, the Industrial Revolution, also saw unprecedented demographic growth.

Second, insofar as artificial intelligence is not just another form of automation but the introduction of autonomous, generally-intelligent minds capable of matching or even outdoing human genius, agency, and ingenuity, the problem is not even that this remains totally speculative from a technological standpoint, but that, philosophically, it amounts to saying that it is so difficult to get human beings to reproduce under modern techno-industrial conditions that it would be easier to just get rid of them entirely and replace them with artificial human beings. If you care about humanity, then this is not a persuasive argument.

The social niche this argument occupies is not that of a self-confident vision justified earnestly on its clear and universally-recognized merits, but that of a furtive excuse and accounting trick whose assumptions and implications would be widely rejected if they were thoroughly appreciated. “Degrowth” environmentalism effectively proposes that the solution to industrial civilization’s problems is to simply abolish industry while keeping humanity; this is increasingly and accurately recognized as the actual proposition behind the school of thought, and rightly rejected due to the inevitable, self-imposed impoverishment that would follow. Along the same lines, some of the most committed believers in the potential of artificial intelligence are effectively proposing to solve industrial civilization by abolishing humanity while keeping industry.

Neither of these visions actually solve for the desirable outcome of not just maintaining but growing both humanity and industry. One must always ask what undesirable outcome a cope serves to obscure. If we imagine our industrial societies continue on their default trajectories for ten years, then fifty years, then one hundred years, then two hundred years—without inserting speculative total paradigm shifts from environmental collapse, artificial intelligence, or something else—we can imagine societies that, bit by bit, get older, smaller, poorer, more sclerotic, more ineffective, and more riven by more petty political conflict. These societies would slowly lose capabilities they previously had and, if not for the fact they now constitute all of the relevant societies on the planet, we might even say they would become more irrelevant over time.

A prolonged dark age is not an existential risk to humanity. Such dark ages have occurred many times in known history. But it is an existential risk to both current and future scientific, technological, and industrial progress, not to mention all of the dreams and ambitions that would be achievable only by vigorously wielding them. It is therefore a pressing societal imperative to develop a model of industrial society that preserves both humanity and industry.

One Hundred Years of Post-Scarcity

We have lived in a post-scarcity society since the late 19th century. The term “post-scarcity” is most often used nowadays to mean a world where any conceivable material want, by any person, can be met without political difficulty and at trivial cost. It brings to mind images of Star Trek-style “replicators,” fictional machines that can instantaneously generate any desired object on demand. Usually, it is assumed that hypothesized future progress in artificial intelligence will lead us to this world of unimaginable plenty, which, it is also usually assumed, will usher in an unprecedented age of peace and harmony as conflicts over wealth and resources become pointless. This vision rests, however, on a bad definition of post-scarcity. True philosophically rigorous post-scarcity is impossible, both because there is no reason to think human desire or imagination will ever reach any kind of objective, hard limit and because, in the end, the matter, energy, and access to other valued people we will ever have are necessarily finite. It is not possible for everyone, at the same time, to get the maximal extent of what they can imagine and desire.

The definition of what constitutes post-scarcity is therefore necessarily arbitrary, tied to some normative standard of affluence. Insofar as we are arbitrarily proposing that there are standards of affluence to which all of humanity should aspire at once—why not choose the transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial consumerism? After all, a human being’s needs to survive can be far more objectively quantified and enumerated than a human being’s wants.

For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, subsistence was the default state of humanity. People would work from dawn to dusk, sweating and toiling in the fields, to feed themselves and their families. One nasty war, drought, plague, or famine could spell the end of an entire community or even nation. The needs of human beings were being met—but barely. Then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, everything changed. An incredible spate of technological innovation and industrial expansion saw living standards in the most advanced countries rise and rise and rise until, in the present day, a poor person in an undeveloped and unindustrialized country will eat surplus food shipped from the developed world’s mechanized farms, clothe himself in cheap apparel imported from a factory in Asia, and use electricity generated by infrastructure built with the rich world’s generously donated pocket change. Over 90% of the jobs available in America in 1800 have been fully automated, mostly because well over half were just in agriculture. Today, just 1% of U.S. jobs require presence on a farm.

In the same way we can speculate that a “post-scarcity” version of modern society would be one where people spend all their newly-afforded time on art, hiking, and poetry, rather than war and work, we can ask what the transformative, “post-scarcity” material surplus afforded by the Industrial Revolution was sunk into. The correctly-formed version of this question should yield the same answer as asking what the typical person in a wealthy society today does with most of their time, in the same way we would answer that a “post-scarcity” society would afford a lot of time for art, hiking, and poetry. Overall, it looks like we sunk our industrial surplus into fake jobs.

Whereas 80% of workers in America circa 1800 were farmers, 80% of workers in America circa 2025 work in “services,” as opposed to industry or agriculture. These modern-day workers are still expected to devote about half their waking hours to employment, for nearly the entirety of every year, for nearly the entirety of their lives. Nearly 40% of U.S. GDP is spent by the government. Another partially overlapping 10% is spent by nonprofits. Some untold number of non-government jobs only exist due to the inscrutable influence and regulation of the government, whether in law, healthcare, insurance, or other fields. That far too much time is wasted on the appearance of productivity, or far too much effort on securing intangible goods that once came at no cost, is a universal complaint. A similar picture preponderates in the rest of the developed world.

This situation does not appear to be the result of intentional planning or design. Rather, it seems to be a stable equilibrium we stumbled into, unintentionally, by attempting to settle a series of political conflicts over how to use the surplus afforded by industry. If a hypothetical artificial intelligence revolution could singularly lead to a new world of abundance that would merit its own rules, values, and norms, we could apply the same logic retroactively. Both the real Industrial Revolution and the hypothetical artificial intelligence revolution, seen this way, are tantamount to an alien mothership of inconceivable technology and resources—factories are just replicators with more steps—crashing on Earth and disrupting the logic of all existing social technologies, as the capabilities of the material technology underneath them suddenly transform.

The superintelligent AI would not be the first “alien” to live among mere humans. The scientists and industrialists who created modern technology were also, for all intents and purposes, aliens. “The Martians” was the nickname given to the famous Hungarian Jewish physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Surely, they were but one species of alien. Do we have more or less Nikola Teslas and Thomas Edisons today, or John von Neumanns and Albert Einsteins? Technological progress reached peak acceleration in the lifetimes of these men and others, and has greatly slowed down since the 1960s or so.

The fundamental paradigm shift wrought by these aliens, the ability of humanity to produce orders of magnitude more wealth per person than ever imagined before, could be seen as creating the real question over which the most intense political and intellectual conflicts have been fought ever since: what should we do with all this surplus? The enduring simplicity of one answer, to give it away and let people indulge, is perhaps the driving appeal behind what we call communism and socialism. The fear of revolution eventually led all industrial states, including the U.S., to adopt a softer version of economic redistribution and guaranteed economic privileges to the poor, the old, the sick, the needy, and—the forgotten revolutionary class—the intellectuals.

As a result, “capitalism” has not meaningfully existed in the developed world since the heyday of the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. The arguments that to this day are regularly trotted out to justify “free market” or libertarian policies have a beauty and consistency of their own, but bear little to no resemblance to the societies they are intended to describe or reform. Load-bearing features of theories that describe how free markets will lead to wealth and progress, such as unfettered market competition, have been suspended by governments for a century through mass wealth redistribution, bureaucratic regulation, debasement of currency, favoritism of certain companies over others, the co-option of corporations as enforcers of ideological programs, and many other means.

Given this history, there is good reason to be skeptical that Darwinian free market capitalism even works as a political formula, and therefore as a durable basis for a society. Its necessary building block, the rational, profit-seeking Homo economicus, perhaps just does not exist in sufficient quantities and densities to scale and drive progress on his own. Perhaps the Homo sapiens we are stuck with is content with a life of unearned frivolity after his bare subsistence needs are met—which they have been.

But meeting him halfway with the compromise of a “mixed-economy social democracy,” the unquestioned societal and economic model of the whole developed world today, irrevocably corrupts the pure and beautiful logic of free markets. What if a communist country compromised on its persistent poverty and backwardness by allowing half the economy to run on free markets, in order to subsidize the other half? How different would that look from the system we have today? Would we celebrate it? Is this just kind of what China did?

The modern “capitalism” we are stuck with today, then, is not the vigorous and glorious tournament of production described in economics textbooks, but a restrained and neutered system whose only purpose is to economically support the very fakeness it claims to oppose. Creating economic growth and technological progress without concomitant political, intellectual, and institutional reform, therefore, amounts to nothing more than subsidizing a broken and even hostile system, augmenting its capabilities and prolonging its lifespan, in an unreciprocated and ultimately futile way. No wonder so many jobs seem fake.

Even if a revisionist market liberalism that would seek to undo the last century and a half of redistribution and restraint could be mustered as a political force, could it even do so legitimately? The scientists whose intellectual work laid the foundations for modern technology and industry did not pursue such work out of a desire to capture maximum profit, but to enlighten and uplift humanity. Even many of the industrialists who applied that vaunted science to the gritty world of smelters and assembly lines, of stock markets and bottom lines, later donated much of their fortunes to universities, libraries, and foundations. How could one claw back what was freely given in the first place? There would be no liberal grounds to do so, at least.

Long-term, the surplus of the Industrial Revolution was sunk partially into indulgence and partially into fake work. It was not invested into further, real work, as it should have been, like any good investment. Humanity had its post-scarcity moment already, and it was squandered. Our material technology jumped ahead into the 22nd century, while our politics and culture remained stuck in the 18th and the 19th centuries. Continued attempts to drive forward industrial and technological progress are, for their own sake, a good thing. But they are not the best thing, and will not solve the broken political economy of our civilization, nor can they substitute—like technological “accelerationists” hope—for a real, humane answer to the fundamental question of how to deploy material surplus at a civilizational scale, and why.

Commandeering the Alien Mothership

A rising American thinker recently interviewed by The New York Times has offered a concise formulation for rethinking the basis of our relationship to work, society, and the economy: the purpose of a society should be to maximize the value of its people and, since a person becomes more valuable through fully expressing their talents through challenging work, the purpose of a society should be to maximally challenge all of its people with maximally challenging work appropriately calibrated to their talents. In contrast, our societies today instead try to maximize consumption, which devalues our people as they get softer, flabbier and, even, fail to reproduce. He proposes the solution of introducing “artificial difficulty” into the economy by “restrict[ing] the technology of production.” He imagines former office workers taking up new careers as stonemasons and craftsmen. Going further, a hypothetical disinterested global military hegemon could even restrict the use of technology in warfare to incentivize a return to sword-and-sandal warfare, bringing back good-paying, skilled jobs in swordsmanship and horseback archery.

There is no need for artificial economic difficulty, however, and there never has been, because there is a source of inexhaustible natural economic difficulty already available to us: space.

The fundamental problem with our version of industrial society appears to be that we are powering it with the appetites of our people; this is “maximizing consumption” or “consumerism.” The problem is that the more people consume, at a certain point, the less they are capable of working. Excess consumption causes human capital depreciation. This does not mean consumption as measured by economists, in dollars, although there is substantial overlap. It means consumption in the sense of satisfaction of individual human appetites, eventually to the detriment of the whole human being and his or her society. To tightly define and quantify these appetites would be a long and thorny endeavor. But their existence, at least, seems clear enough. Excess consumption must be at least part of the problem for the obese and for addicts, two of the most glaring victims of industrial consumption; it is also a way of describing excessive competition for positional goods, the activity which perhaps most singularly defines the lives of the most materially affluent people alive today.

In the words of Foxconn founder Terry Gou, “outside the laboratory, there is no high technology, only the implementation of discipline.” Consumption exhausts the human being’s capacity for discipline, which results in industrial decline. Human appetites are self-limiting. But industry is unlimited. Whereas the limits of consumption are near and fleshy, the limits of production conceivably lie at the point where the expansion of space surpasses the speed of light. That developing and largely unindustrialized countries like India or Colombia are seeing rapidly falling birth rates is evidence that it is not industrial production which causes fertility collapse, but industrial consumption. They are getting the overflow of the industrialized world, which can produce more smartphones and televisions, more sweets and candies, more appealing online videos, more appliances and apparel, more power plants and electrical poles, than it knows what to do with, just like it produces so much grain that ancient breadbaskets like Egypt today import food from the developed world rather than bother feeding themselves.

The way consumerism powers industry is that it is socially, intellectually, and legally encouraged and rewarded to exhaust appetites in ever more incredible ways, using a price system within a mostly free market to measure effectiveness. This works pretty well since people will pay to reliably satisfy appetites, and companies can pay marketers to reliably generate appetites through advertising and media campaigns. The “difficulty” in such an economic system lies in identifying and arousing new appetites among the masses.

But consumerism and maximized consumption are not intrinsic extensions of free markets or capitalism. A free society of Nikola Teslas and John von Neumanns would not have invented corn syrup or internet slop videos. There would be no profit in providing such consumption in such a society, because there would be no demand for it. In our world, we cannot, of course, assume we are working with a society of Teslas and von Neumanns. But to assume we are working with undifferentiated, rational economic actors with infinite appetites of no negative externality is equally mistaken. Consumerism is one of many possible applications of social engineering, and arguably a misapplication.

We could instead imagine a system where “difficulty” comes from overcoming challenges handed down or agreed upon by fiat. To avoid waste and tyranny, such challenges would need to be limited somehow to obvious, public, and natural ones. The classical parallel would be a war economy—where war is the most obvious and public challenge imaginable—reaching its ideal in the industrialized WWII-era economies that saw both production and technological progress reach never-before-seen heights, producing everything from space rockets to nuclear power to computers in the span of less than a decade. Besides the killing and destruction, the problem with war is that you cannot wage it without a credible enemy, and credible enemies for our globe-spanning techno-industrial civilization are in short supply.

This could be thought of as the “public works” or “megaproject”-driven economy. Rather than maximizing consumption, we will aim to maximize production according to the obvious, public, and natural challenges available to us. Such challenges will have to be rated based on how much exertion of human capital they require; the more, the better. On this metric, the most challenging challenges will all inevitably end up in the category of space exploration and settlement. The most unimaginably challenging megaprojects are not even interplanetary, but interstellar. A civilization genuinely committed to undertaking such projects would finally generate the political capital necessary to streamline the economy, eliminate rent-seeking, and solve a million other minor and major problems, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It would also finally generate demand for human beings and therefore offer the possibility of solving the fertility crisis.

If we are just picking an arbitrary megaproject, then why not something other than space? The answer is that, first, we should pursue arbitrary megaprojects on Earth in addition to in space. But the difference is that any arbitrary megaproject besides space is an arbitrary megaproject that will eventually be completed, whereas space is the arbitrary megaproject that effectively never, ever ends. Space expansion is not incompatible with a list of subsidiary goals like satisfying appetites, achieving runaway taste through technological restrictions, building colonies underwater or on Antarctica, or whatever else. But every other goal will be more finite and limited in its intangible value and positive externalities compared to space. You will always eventually have to return to the question of space. So you might as well base your industrial civilization around that to begin with, and this will help correctly maximize production, talent, dynamism, and efficiency for an expanding and humane civilization.

We could also choose arbitrary microprojects—why don’t we humans arbitrarily choose to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe? The short answer is that that is stupid and nobody will ever believe it. The long answer is that the positive externalities of infinitely cheaper paperclips are clearly of less intangible value to humanity than, say, expanding throughout the universe. The whole question revolves around what intangible goal of intangible value we wish to direct the machine of industry towards. If a literal alien mothership crashed on planet Earth, our fate and responsibility would be obvious: commandeer it, reverse-engineer it, and take the fight to the cosmos. We have had the exact same responsibility since our metaphorical alien mothership crashed over a hundred years ago. We have only lacked the eyes to see it. Better late than never.

The same year that Otellini took the reins at Intel, James McNerney became the new CEO of Boeing, America’s one and only manufacturer of large passenger airplanes and a key contractor to NASA and the Pentagon. Like Otellini, McNerney was an MBA—Master of Business Administration—not an engineer. Though he wasn’t the first non-engineer ever to lead the century-old company, he was the first without any previous experience in aerospace. Aiming to cut costs, McNerney determined that, rather than designing and building a whole new plane, the company would simply modify one of its key planes, the 737, to be the new and improved 737 MAX. Not long after entering service a decade later, two of these updated planes inexplicably crashed shortly after takeoff, killing a combined 346 people. The cause was a convoluted series of poor and ultimately fatal design choices that Boeing had not disclosed to pilots, in order to preserve the marketing fiction of a merely updated plane, rather than a new one, which would have required the, in hindsight, comparatively trivial burden of retraining pilots.

While Otellini and McNerney were taking charge, across the Pacific Ocean another chief executive was wrapping up his term. Nobuyuki Idei had become the CEO of Sony in 1999, becoming responsible for Japan’s most innovative consumer electronics and entertainment company. Three long, consecutive tenures by founding engineers had turned Sony from a radio repair shop amidst the ruins of post-war Japan into a global conglomerate that gave the world the Walkman, the CD, and the PlayStation, among many other state-of-the-art electronics products. Idei was the first CEO not to have a background in engineering. He decided to reorganize Sony to be “independent from past glory and the founders’ shadow,” adopting modern managerial techniques and structures. Since he left, Sony has not produced a single new transformative electronics product.

Since 2021, Intel’s revenue has crashed by a third. Since 2018, Boeing’s has fallen by a quarter. Sony’s revenue hasn’t meaningfully grown since 2008. It is easy to tell when a company stalls or stumbles. But it takes a meticulous, in-depth investigation to determine whether such failings are evidence of organizational dysfunction, or just the temporary setbacks and necessary hurdles that any competent organization might face. When failures can be traced to bad strategy or structure, the mistake’s origin might already be decades in the past. It is remarkable that three modern-day high-tech companies, at the tops of very different fields, all made catastrophic strategic errors apparently as soon as they put outsiders to the company’s technical tradition of knowledge in charge. They are unlikely to be the only similar cases in the global economy.

The unusual 21st century dynamism of software founders seeking to transform society, create behemoth business empires, or achieve technological feats straight from the pages of science fiction has both exaggerated the contributions of software to the whole economy in the public mind and obscured how many other economic sectors are dominated by inert dead players. Everyone pays attention to the latest chips and chatbots produced by Nvidia or OpenAI. But what is going on in the chemicals industry? What are the latest innovations in refrigeration technology? Have we found that cure for cancer yet? Or that room-temperature superconductor? What are all of the non-software companies even doing all day?

The Divergent Aims of Modern-Day Companies

The problem of companies being enthusiastically managed into irrelevance is often simplified to blaming MBAs, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Although Intel’s Otellini and Boeing’s McNerney were MBAs, Sony’s Idei was just a career manager who went to college in Japan. Jeff Immelt, an MBA, presided over the precipitous decline of General Electric from 2001 to 2017. Yet his notorious predecessor for twenty years, Jack Welch, is often held equally responsible—and he had a PhD in chemical engineering. Westinghouse, once an American industrial conglomerate with a major line of business in building nuclear reactors, undertook a seemingly absurd and ultimately fatal pivot into becoming a media company in the 1990s. The man who led that change, Michael H. Jordan, was a chemical engineer by training too—though also a former McKinsey partner.

Rather, the problem seems to stem from a particular way of thinking about what a company even is, what its goals are, and what measures are or are not appropriate to achieve those goals. In simplified terms, we can think of companies as organized to create value and sustain themselves by capturing a portion of the created value as financial profit. When executives, board members, and major investors manage companies by and for the bottom line, they operate on a theory of the company as a vehicle solely for capturing profit. When this happens, the difficult and holistic question of creating value in the first place—a question unique for every company—simply goes unaddressed. It is treated as a permanently solved, one-time problem that no longer merits attention or resources; at Boeing, for instance, senior engineers were reportedly told they were no longer needed because Boeing’s products were “mature,” as if it was impossible for further progress in airplanes to ever be made. The focus is instead on raising profit margins and share prices through cost-cutting and various other attempts to improve efficiency or appeal to investors. This school of thought appears to be the dominant one in the influential U.S. financial sector and might be termed “shareholder capitalism.”

A distinct but also ascendant school of thought might be called “stakeholder capitalism,” as promoted by economists like the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab and institutionalized through measures like “ESG” or “DEI.” Rather than harshly optimizing for capturing profit, this school of thought essentially teaches that the value companies can create is not limited to financial value for shareholders or useful products for customers, but also includes intangible value for a company’s own employees, society writ large, the government, and even the natural environment. A company can legitimately create value by mobilizing its managers and employees to participate in efforts to solve problems entirely unrelated to a company’s unique specialties or product offerings. In practice, this means companies mainly try to imitate new fashions or implement received wisdom in an undifferentiated way.

There does exist a school of thought that teaches that a company is meant to create as much value as possible through specialization and breakthrough improvements in products. But it appears to be largely limited to the software engineers of Silicon Valley, only semi-institutionalized through organizations like Y Combinator or the bottom-up cults of personality surrounding exceptionally successful startup founders and venture capitalists. Outside of software and the few domains where former software entrepreneurs have already founded new market entrants, creating more unique and tangible value is at best a secondary concern after capturing more profit or contributing to the intangible value of a society with socially conscious firms.

This implies that much of the modern economy is not even trying to undertake productive economic activity as it is commonly understood. Though surprising, this conclusion seems to provide a satisfying and elegant explanation for many contemporary socioeconomic mysteries. Though MBAs, financiers, managers, or accountants are perhaps more inclined to view a company as a vehicle for capturing profits or intangibly contributing to society, there is nothing preventing trained engineers from inclining toward the same views as well. After all, engineers are formally trained in engineering, not in an alternative theory of business management.

When Intel passed on the iPhone, it was forgoing an expensive and complicated project in many ways at odds with the technical attributes of Intel’s more arcane and power-hungry chips, which were more suited for desktop computers than phones. This saved Intel a lot of money in the short run. But in the long run, it amounted to giving up Intel’s leadership in a still rapidly-growing computing industry. Both value creation and profit capture would have likely been better served in the long run by taking the chance and using it as an opportunity to mobilize Intel’s engineers. Boeing should not have risked the integrity of its traditions of engineering and manufacturing to cut a few financial corners. Sony did not have to stop experimenting with new consumer devices. There was no inevitable condition of physics or markets that necessitated these companies’ decisions, only the contingent and avoidable succession failure that resulted in leaders unable to create value.

Every company attempting to achieve a particular material outcome—whether this means building the most advanced semiconductors, the most reliable airplanes, or the most popular electronic devices—is an extremely fragile organism behind the gleaming headquarters, world-renowned brand, and army of salaried professionals. Without attentive, zealous, and knowledgeable leadership from the top, even the most well-resourced companies will quickly devolve from innovation and functionality into stagnation and dysfunction, as the local, day-to-day priorities of employees and executives diverge from the overall mission and wider circumstances change without a commensurate change in strategy. The careful alignment of people and priorities needed to deliver efficiency, quality, and innovation can be irreparably shattered with just one chief executive who temporarily prioritizes a different goal.

Industries in the Absence of Industrialists

Without fresh founders and seasoned industrialists seeking to create value through breakthroughs in science, technology, design, or logistics, industries and the companies they consist of do not disappear entirely, but limp along outside the public eye. Interestingly, they also morph in a distinct way, developing certain features very different from companies in a competitive and growing industry.

One unmistakable pattern is what I term the “portfolio theory of the firm.” This is the phenomenon of executives, board members, and investors treating a company not like a single, fragile organization of human beings, but like a grab-bag of different assets that can be rearranged or traded out until the sum of their financial figures adds up favorably—like an investment portfolio. The company becomes not the organization itself, but the financial product wrapped around it. Such companies demonstrate a strong tendency for regular acquisitions, mergers, divestments, spinoffs, rebrands, and internal reorganizations, as executives tear apart and stitch together new combinations of brands and divisions in the quest for the ideal bottom line.

Such an approach works fine for trading stocks or other financial products, since there are no externalities to making exchanges. But every corporate reorganization creates friction and uncertainty for the hard workers being reorganized, and creates more opportunities for the wrong people to be fired and the wrong programs to be axed. Both of these are negative externalities that damage a company’s ability to function. More importantly, it prevents visionary leaders from taking charge and reorganizing companies to optimize for technical prowess, logistical scale, or some new grand ambition. Each further recombination makes it politically harder for a live player to “unfuck” a company in the future.

A perfect example of such a portfolio-fied company is the defense contractor until recently known as Raytheon, now known as RTX Corporation. Today, the missile, radar, and electronics manufacturer founded by Vannevar Bush is no longer an autonomous firm, but just one of three unrelated subsidiaries of RTX Corporation, alongside the aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney and a new aircraft parts manufacturing subsidiary called Collins Aerospace, itself put together from a slew of earlier acquisitions and reorganizations. The CEOs who merged their companies to form the new alphabet soup corporate entity were unusually honest about their rationale: since “about 50 percent of the business will be domestic, 50 percent international, 50 percent defense, and 50 percent commercial,” the resulting company would be more “resilient.” Unrelatedness was not a bug, but a feature, since then no difficult technical or logistical integration would be necessary and the company’s stock would be a more stable financial product. The ideal company, one imagines, must then be one with 100 different unrelated products providing exactly 1% of revenue each. The CEO of RTX Corporation is a lawyer.

The defense industry is rife with such cases, with some technically specialized companies like solid rocket motor manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne getting traded around like hot potatoes by larger defense contractors. The pharmaceutical industry is also a prime case study in the portfolio theory of the firm. The fortunes of pharmaceutical companies are defined, by and large, just by what roster of new, incrementally-better medications the company has managed to recently produce and license or—just as often—acquire from someone else. There need be no scientific or medical rhyme or reason to a pharmaceutical company’s roster of drugs, whether over the short or long term, only that they all hopefully sell well and at high prices. AstraZeneca, for example, turned its fortunes around by betting on a new lung cancer drug, while its second-best-selling drug was for diabetes. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pfizer’s best-selling drugs ranged from pneumonia vaccines to treatments for breast cancer and epilepsy.

While perhaps a fine way to reliably generate profits, it is not these portfolio-fied companies that have been responsible for the greatest leaps forward in pharmaceutical science. The company behind semaglutide—the chemical in the breakthrough weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy and an apparent cure for obesity and diabetes—is Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, which was founded a century ago by Nobel Prize-winning physician August Krogh to manufacture insulin, and has hewed almost exclusively to studying endocrinology and selling diabetes therapeutics since then. As in contrast to Intel or Sony, it is creating unprecedented value that proves to be the superior strategy for financial performance: at $600 billion, Novo Nordisk is the single most valuable company in Europe and nearly twice as valuable as the second-ranked company, Louis Vuitton.

When just one company in an industry is deprioritizing tangible value creation, this is most likely to be manifested as something like gratuitous cost-cutting or dodging risky new bets. But when most or even all relevant companies in an industry are, it becomes possible to coordinate to pursue these goals cross-company, since companies are no longer directly competing with each other in a zero-sum battle for customers’ dollars, but pursuing the same non-rivalrous goals of squeezing out profits or trying to contribute to various imagined public goods. Rather than being loyalists to a particular company and its people, executives freely move back and forth between supposedly competing companies and begin seeing themselves as a class of interchangeable stewards for “the industry,” who deserve similar pay, benefits, and status owing to their membership in this implicit collective leadership. Cutthroat competition is the last thing they want.

Ironically, a concentration of companies focused on capturing profits results not in Darwinian creative destruction, but a medieval guild-like structure. That this dynamic is visible even in the modern era gives new weight to the immortal words of Adam Smith that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick [sic] or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Companies Deserve Merciful Deaths or New Life

The most impressive, dynamic companies look not like portfolios, but disciplined squads with a single-minded, laser focus on achieving one clear mission, whether that is understanding diabetes like Novo Nordisk or, say, making electric cars better than gasoline cars like Tesla. Elon Musk, in fact, helps illustrate another key difference between companies that are focused on creating value and companies that aren’t. Another way to describe the portfolio theory of the firm is that its adherents believe every company is just a holding company waiting to be born. But while holding companies rightly carry the connotation of existing mainly to take advantage of legal, regulatory, investment, or tax privileges, they are superficially similar in structure—diversified, unrelated businesses—to what we call conglomerates, evoking the functional and often family-run industrial conglomerates of East Asia like Samsung or Mitsubishi.

The difference between a holding company and a conglomerate is that a holding company is optimizing for passive financial performance, whereas a conglomerate is optimizing for strategic autonomy. A holding company collects paper titles to existing monetarily valuable assets. A conglomerate applies a living tradition of knowledge in industrial planning and business management to new domains, expanding by mobilizing more people to create new value. With a diverse array of often vertically-integrated companies or subsidiaries under the control of a single chain of command, sweeping grand plans that would be prohibitively costly or complex for a smaller or narrower company become possible. 

In South Korea, the chaebol conglomerates like Samsung or Hyundai do not legally exist under a single corporate hierarchy, but are informally tied together by a single family, top deputies, supplier relationships, and cross-shareholdings. Given some of the reporting on sharing of personnel, knowledge, and family board members between Tesla and SpaceX—not to mention the CEO—perhaps the companies in the orbit of Elon Musk are also better thought of as just part of a single Musk chaebol. We just lack the words and concepts to label such organizations in modern America.

The modern American company has a peculiar life cycle. Rather than ending in a timely death, its life is often ended prematurely by succession failure. But it is then also prevented from resting in peace, instead propped up in a stagnant, zombie-like existence, prolonged by organizational inertia, opaque barriers to entry, and a relative shortage of competitive new market entrants, until it is inevitably chopped up into little pieces and rearranged into what are effectively unremarkable holding companies.

When a series of founders and founding engineers runs out, there are only two socially acceptable types of outsider executives who can be installed: those trained to capture profits and those trained to exert a company in service to intangible social goals. Until and unless a new source of executive training and thinking is built, one which teaches that companies deserve quick and merciful deaths or immediate and uncompromising resuscitation, even the most prestigious and cash-rich companies won’t be immune to zombification, and the most talented and ambitious men and women of each generation will choose to found new organizations rather than serve or take charge of old ones.

There is no shortage of anecdotes about Americans who visit Europe for the first time and are shocked to discover streets that are safe at night, food that is tastier yet healthier, and large cities that are nonetheless beautiful and walkable. The reverse is much rarer, if only because true Europeans don’t write about their experiences on the internet in English. As a dual European-American citizen from birth, I have spent roughly half my life in North America and half in Europe, so neither continent is capable of giving me culture shock. The same was not true of my wife, a true European whom I was hazing with a not-so-grand tour of the great cities of the United States of America.

“I’ll call an Uber up there, okay?” Even for me, the haunted atmosphere was a bit much and significantly worse than I remembered from just a few years before. But there were clearly people in the distance ahead of us, I thought, so we shouldn’t inordinately frighten ourselves. But, fast-walking forward, it didn’t take us long to realize that those weren’t tourists or late-night shoppers strolling down from Union Square, but what must have been a hundred homeless people hanging out, sprawled out on the pavement, and doing drugs. Many Europeans, my wife included, will gripe incessantly about the alleged lack of public safety and order in Europe. Suffice it to say, she has not mentioned it a single time since visiting San Francisco—on paper, one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world.

Comparing the World’s Paper Wealth

The discrepancy between America’s paper wealth and its real wealth is not something that can be ignored when comparing America’s wealthiness to the rest of the world, especially Europe and East Asia. Since 2008, nominal U.S. GDP has outpaced that of the European Union to the point that the EU is now just two-thirds the economy that the U.S. is, rather than the prior near-parity. U.S. nominal GDP per capita is nearing Singapore’s, while all of Europe except for small rich states like Norway or Monaco are significantly behind. After a decade of sluggish growth, Europe’s fortunes compared to America’s took another sharp turn for the worse following the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and then the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But these aren’t reasons for American triumphalism, let alone reasons to claim that America is now unfathomably wealthier than Europe. To begin with, just looking at more numbers makes the picture far less dramatic. Europe’s GDP was also one-third smaller than the United States’ in 2000, before growing to parity by 2008 and again falling behind. Simply adjusting for purchasing power to remove the distortions caused by exchange rate fluctuations takes the GDP per capita of Germany—the largest country and economy in Europe—from less than two-thirds of America’s to nearly 90% of it. By this metric, the EU as a whole was 75% as affluent as the U.S. in 2022.

The OECD gives less favorable, but still fathomable, figures: in 2021, the average household in the European Union had 61% of the gross disposable income of the average household in the United States. Germany was at 77% of the U.S. figure. Then again, the same numbers say that Japan is poorer than Lithuania and that South Korea is poorer than Portugal. We might want to take the significance of such numbers with a grain of salt. The gap between what statistics purport to capture and what they actually capture means we can use them as pieces of evidence, but we still require a principled model of reality in which to fit and judge them—as well as interaction with reality itself.

Money, wealth, and value are three related but different things that are easy to confuse with each other. Money is what you use to exchange wealth, that is, actual goods or services, from which you then derive some tangible or intangible value. The traditional view of wealth is that it is not just about having money, but also about having that money go somewhere, far enough to provide a certain amount of value from a certain amount of wealth. Gold and jewels, but also cattle, fields, spices, exotic fruits, glittering palaces, large estates, rare books, leisurely afternoons, beautiful wives, healthy children, loyal friends, dutiful servants, and so on. It’s why you can say the average inhabitant of a developed country today is in some ways richer than Chinese Emperors used to be.

We can update the list somewhat for the modern day, but the principle of having a holistic definition of wealth independent from mere money remains. There is arguably already such an updated modern-day definition, which we term “quality of life” and, ironically, is something Americans far more readily admit is superior in Europe. To say that the “quality of life is higher” in Europe because there is less work, less crime, less driving, better and healthier food, and more beautiful people and buildings, is just to list a bunch of ways that Europeans are collectively wealthier than Americans, but framed in a specific way to prevent this wealth from being accounted.

One can derive value from wealth without being its owner, which is the more important facet of wealthiness when comparing continent-sized societies of hundreds of millions of people, rather than two particular individuals. We recognize that the children of the wealthy are themselves wealthy too, if only through their parents’ doting rather than paper ownership of assets. Based on the same principle, we can recognize that public wealth also exists and ought to be factored in when making comparisons of societies. Just because public wealth is more difficult to measure, apportion, or liquidate than individual wealth or one’s personal bank account does not make it less real or relevant, not least because such wealth is necessarily made possible only through many acts of individual sacrifice and effort orchestrated by unique social technology.

In addition to adjusting for purchasing power and disposable income, an easy way to get closer to a real comparison of affluence is to adjust for hours worked, which lets you guess at leisure time, one of the most obviously desirable forms of wealth. According to The Economist, when adjusting for purchasing power and hours worked in 2022, the two most affluent countries by far are Norway and Luxembourg. Once you add in Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden—all the other countries ranked higher than the U.S.—you are no longer talking about one or two small and unrepresentative rich countries, but 52 million Europeans who are more affluent than the U.S. average. Perhaps we should think of these countries, collectively, as “Europe’s California,” rather than a few irrelevant and unrelated Vermonts. In any case, the 83 million Germans are at 97% of the U.S. figure, while the 68 million French are at 93% of it. Another chart, measuring net household disposable income in 2021 adjusted for actual individual consumption, purchasing power parity, and hours worked, found that Germany was the highest at 87% of the U.S. figure, followed by France at 85%, and Belgium at 85%.

Both sets of figures clash with our assumptions in other interesting ways. For example, the United Kingdom and Italy are roughly on par with each other and both far below Germany or France, the powerhouses of the continent. But Canada—America’s little brother—is below any of them! Despite vigorous catch-up growth since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is still only about half as affluent as America. The highest-ranked former communist country is Slovenia, which is on par with Spain. The largest, Poland, is between 46% and 58% of the U.S. figure, depending on the chart. Then again, maybe we shouldn’t be so dismissive, given that these countries were actually unfathomably poorer than the United States just one-and-a-half generations ago. As a kid in formerly communist Europe, I still remember washing myself in a bathtub with cold water. But there is a nice hot shower there now—and even air conditioning! I like to joke that, when seeing ugly communist apartment blocks today, you should remember that the post-communist GDP increases all went into the insides of buildings rather than their outsides.

It is also worth noting that economic inequality is simply higher in the United States, which means the European numbers will more coherently apply to the societies they are intended to represent. This inequality is usually articulated as a negative thing by commentators, as if the U.S. does not take care of its poor people, but it is equally because the much more dynamic U.S. economy produces more genuinely very wealthy people per capita—more outlier multi-millionaires and billionaires—than any European country. Income inequality in the U.S. is higher than any country in Europe, even Russia. Wealth inequality is higher than all European countries except Russia and esoterically inegalitarian Sweden.

According to UBS’ Global Wealth Report for 2023, the mean wealth per adult in the U.S. was higher than any surveyed country in the world except Switzerland. But the median wealth per adult was the same as Spain or Italy! Here it was Belgium that came in first place, with both France and the United Kingdom pulling ahead of the U.S., though notably with Germany and Sweden falling far behind. No statistic is a perfect substitute for an informed generalist appraisal, and different statistics tend to disagree with each other on exact rankings. But it is safe to say that the statistics themselves make the notion that the United States is unfathomably wealthier than Europe untenable—something that can also be verified by just visiting.

City Life is a Way to Measure Wealth

I can hardly speak for rural life, since I have never lived in the countryside for any substantial period of time. But given that well over half the populations of both the U.S. and every European country live in urban areas, it is urban and suburban life that is more relevant to compare. In my experience, one cannot find the amenities typical of even mid-sized and second-tier European cities anywhere in America except Manhattan and perhaps a few small and select neighborhoods in other top-tier U.S. cities. Most of America is, in fact, defined by highways and strip malls and this, in fact, sucks—which is why nobody ever seriously defends it on its own merits, but just claims it is the legitimate result of the impersonal hand of the market satisfying consumer demand. In Europe, it is unremarkable to live in a city where you can leisurely accomplish all conceivable errands by foot or, perhaps, by jumping onto a bicycle or tram. Density and walkability energize social life and ubiquitous low-commitment bars, cafés, eateries, parks, and even nightclubs make spontaneity possible.

Even where such amenities are available in America, not gated by miles of driving, one is not as free to use them due to rampant crime. In Europe, urban crime is more of a regional phenomenon, rising higher in Southern Italy or the high-immigration cities of France, Sweden, and England, but leaving even large and dense cities like Amsterdam, Madrid, Copenhagen, Warsaw, or Munich safer than Salt Lake City. In America, crime is a national phenomenon, far more common than in Europe, and far more violent. In 2022, the U.S. had an intentional homicide rate of 6.4 murders per 100,000 people, just above Yemen and below Zimbabwe in the rankings. France, Sweden, and England were all at about 1.1 murders, and most of Europe is lower still, such as Germany at 0.8 or Italy at 0.5. America is literally ten times more violent than some European countries and still more than five times as violent as some of the largest ones. If one is unable to derive value from some item of wealth, public or private, due to the risk of intentional injury or death, then one is not being made wealthier by it.

America does not lack its own forms of public wealth, some that are even unthinkable to Europeans, like the national parks or vast tracts of public land. One could say, provocatively, that while Europe’s public wealth rests mainly on social technology, America’s rests mainly on its surplus of land. The EU is three times as dense as the U.S. in terms of population, which might go a way towards explaining why American dwellings are three times larger than European ones.

But overall, it is hard to say that America is significantly wealthier than Europe, or vice versa. As someone who has had one foot in each continent his whole life, Europe and America seem roughly equally as wealthy. That Europeans don’t use dryers or air conditioners is as absurd and impoverished, in my mind, as that Americans nonchalantly become obese through copious consumption of sugar water or evacuate from downtown urban areas at night due to crime and disorder. The American advantage in earning hard cash, in practice, just seems to be undercut or balanced out by the American disadvantage in public wealth, and the reverse is true for Europe.

Papering Over Impoverishment to Turn Back the Political Clock

The debate over whether America or Europe is more affluent is a relatively new one and one that is brought up by only one side of the debate and always in the same context: Americans trying to flex on Europe in order to gin up patriotic sentiment on behalf of America’s incumbent political and economic institutions. American populism, as represented by Donald Trump, outrageously declared that America was not a great and wealthy country, but “like a Third World country” that needed immediate and sweeping reforms in trade, industry, immigration, and infrastructure to live up to its economic potential.

The idea that the unreformed America of today is an untrammeled economic success is the consensus narrative under which the remnants of this defeated populism are cleaned up and recuperated, and a reversion to the contentless and jingoistic norm that prevailed before widespread internet usage. To question America’s economic performance is taken as a lack of patriotism, as if “the economy” were itself the country, or as if only a socialist could notice the merits of European social democracy.

The debate is also, therefore, an omen of what the consensus of America’s incumbent elites has in mind for Europe’s future. Today, Europe is still not significantly poorer than the United States. But it is now on a trajectory to become significantly poorer, in part because of an ideologically-motivated, heavily U.S.-backed proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has cost Europe its previous energy strategy of piping in cheap Russian gas. In Europe, there was no Plan B, just a rationalization of decline as environmentally-friendly “degrowth.” In Washington, nobody cares about European prosperity; helping to destroy it may even be an opportunity! It is this downward trajectory, rather than the current reality, that America’s jingoists are gleefully celebrating when they gloat about GDP figures. They know the figures don’t really check out—yet. But they are looking forward to the day they do, since this will justify further U.S. interventions in Europe on the basis of the superiority of the American model of society.

It is however a mistake for America to want Europe to fail. Many of the same forces that will drive Europe’s economic decline will also drive America’s: low fertility rates, an aging population, ideological opposition to growing energy usage, inflexible and increasingly fragile institutions beset by succession failure, post-industrial exhaustion and the resulting lack of vision—all against the backdrop of a still economically rising China. Europe is not a cautionary tale for America, but the canary in the coal mine.

In many poor countries, there is no amount of money that can buy you the amenities of the developed world. Some items of wealth, even basic things like food that won’t make you ill, are beyond the capability of those societies to provide at any price. This is well understood when thinking of the value of a U.S. dollar in developing countries such as Brazil or South Africa. Rather than justifying the status quo, we should ask ourselves what things no amount of money could buy even in the developed world today.

This article was featured in PALLADIUM 17: Universal Man. To receive your copy of the latest print edition, subscribe now.

I will never forget the sunset when I first saw the solar system with my naked eyes. I was standing on the deck of a boat plodding slowly through the Nile River, closer to Sudan than to the Mediterranean Sea. I had not yet seen the Egyptian night sky, so I was excited to be so far south, with so much unlit desert on either side.

As a result, I was early. The Sun was still illuminating the western horizon. I didn’t plan it that way, but it was too bright to see the stars, yet dark enough to see the Moon and the gleaming dots of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. As it dawned on me that I was seeing five distant planets at once, it dawned on me also that they were all in a perfectly straight line across the sky, perpendicular to the Earthly horizon that tells us we are standing up straight and balanced. All of a sudden, I wasn’t standing on a boat. I was falling face-forward and down the side of the Earth, an incomprehensibly large sphere suspended in an invisible flat disk of planets surrounding a star.

Our animal eyes can observe planets, stars, and even the heart of our galaxy as much as they can observe mountaintops or ocean waves. It is a reminder that our natural habitat on Earth requires at least three separate planetary bodies. The Sun’s light and heat make the Earth habitable. So does the Moon, through gravitational stabilization of the Earth’s tilt and rotation, which keeps the days 24 hours long and the seasons regular and mild. Perhaps the Earth is not our natural habitat, but only a part of it.

This poses an existential problem because it means we cannot think of ourselves as only a terrestrial species. We rightly believe that we must take care of our natural environment. But drawing the border of our natural environment at the Earth’s atmosphere is only a convention. This boundary helps us feel like we are masters of our fate, since our economic and technological capacity to affect the Earth is currently far greater than our capacity to affect the rest of the solar system, let alone the cosmos. If we are not only a terrestrial species, then what are we?

Since the nineteenth century, we have known that the Earth is not the world but an infinitesimal part of it. The combined knowledge and power of humanity, therefore, extends only to an infinitesimal part of the world, with the rest a seemingly infinite mystery. Perhaps the most common response to this is to throw up one’s hands and say that this has shown humanity is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But this is not a way to incorporate the scale of the cosmos into our understanding of humanity, but a denial of the importance of humanity altogether.

It was only in the twentieth century that this view came to predominate, as we grew wary of nuclear apocalypse and fretted over mishandling an Earth we felt was already trampled beneath our feet. The Copernican Revolution in the sixteenth century began as a triumph of human experimentation and observation over handed-down knowledge. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire was already prophesying universal man, truly at the scale of the universe. In the nineteenth century, the cosmos was taken to mean a wealth of resources and knowledge to use in the inevitable future when we conquered even this otherworldly part of nature.

An unresolved existential problem became a political one. A theory of human beings as irrelevant, confined, and small in time and space results in political systems that seek to keep human beings small. The byproduct is the ascendancy of alternative ideological projects like “degrowth,” which seek to put humans back in their place as minor fauna, or like summoning an artificial superintelligence that will either drive us to extinction or, with luck, keep us around as tiny pets.

The scale of the cosmos has not shown that we are irrelevant, but that we simply do not know enough about the world to know our relationship to it. As a species, most of our greatest philosophers, intellectuals, and spiritual leaders lived before the Space Age. Their answers to the questions posed by the cosmos reflected the state of their scientific knowledge, which was, in fact, more advanced than we typically assume. But they ultimately lived in a terrestrial world. Since men first walked on the Moon in 1969, we have not.

To have a flourishing future as a civilization, we have no choice but to resolve the anthropological problem posed by space: what it means to be human will be ultimately determined by how we respond to the question of space, which will itself determine how we organize our societies. To ignore this question is also to ignore an already integral part of human nature—we are de facto already a space-faring animal, the only such animal on this planet. Moreover, this question cannot be answered through philosophy alone because space is not abstract but physical and full of surprises. The only way to answer it is empirical: to explore space ourselves.

To complete our understanding of humanity, there are no alternatives to a space-faring future to the limits of the known universe. Until that time, our book on what humanity is must continue to have blank pages to write on, with room to revise our ideas in light of the natural revelation of the universe. From where we sit today, space will thus twice transform what it means to be human. First, because of what we find—or do not find—among the stars. Second, because the economic, organizational, and technological challenges required to reach the stars at all will require us to alter our social, political, and moral structures.

To Explore Space Is To Transform Humanity

Today, we usually reverse this entailment, with the exploration of space justified on economic, diplomatic, or scientific grounds. For example, NASA’s own literature argues that the agency grows the economy, fosters international cooperation, and drives innovations that improve daily life. Technologies like rockets and satellites have always helped build and use more powerful weapons, so there is also a military justification. But while these are all useful side effects of space exploration, they fall short of a justification for space exploration in and of itself.

In the popular imagination, the Space Age is closely associated with America’s era of consumer prosperity since the 1950s. Accomplishments in space are taken as the results of a wider and inevitable trend of economic growth, technological progress, and eventual world peace led by the United States. Alongside images of the Statue of Liberty and cattle ranchers on the Great Plains, the last page of every U.S. passport shows a space probe floating past the Moon into deep space. If space exploration is inevitable, then perhaps it needs no justification. But what if space exploration wasn’t an inevitable side effect of progress, but instead driven by dedicated, exceptional individuals with mystical beliefs?

In fact, the modern idea of space exploration and—importantly—the technology to make it happen emerged from the era of war, revolution, and economic misery of the early twentieth century, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union. Three men independently derived the equation describing how a rocket can escape the Earth’s gravity: the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, the American Robert Goddard in 1912, and the German Hermann Oberth in 1920.

While he launched the first-ever liquid-fueled rocket in Massachusetts in 1926, the more reclusive Goddard never inspired a wider community of practice in his home country. Both Tsiolkovsky and Oberth did. From the 1920s to the 1930s, a generation of amateur rocket scientists and enthusiasts in Europe conducted the formative research and experimentation that, within a few decades of starting from nothing, would result in arsenals of thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and launches of both men and machines to other planets. Among these enthusiasts were the young future heads of both the U.S. and Soviet space programs: Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, respectively.

Although they would later gain government patronage by building missiles, the first rocketeers were fanatically motivated, almost without exception, by the prospect of space exploration. For von Braun, it began when, as an adolescent, he read Hermann Oberth’s 1923 book The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space, which argued that space travel was feasible with rockets. Full of mathematical equations and dry technical language, a colleague of Oberth’s later quipped that the book “might as well have been printed in Sumerian characters.” The book nonetheless also persuaded the Austrian science writer Max Valier and the German university student Willy Ley, both of whom resolved to help Oberth popularize this dense but groundbreaking work.

In 1927, Oberth, Valier, Ley, and a few other German space enthusiasts founded the “Society for Space Travel” to raise funds for rocketry experiments and promote the idea of space exploration. Collaborating with Opel, the car company, they launched the first German liquid-propellant rocket in 1929. In 1930, a determined, eighteen-year-old von Braun sought out and joined the society. According to a history of space travel that von Braun co-authored late in his life, “virtually all of the civilian experimenters and promoters were much more interested in what the rocket could do, theoretically at least, to further their dreams of visiting the Moon and planets, than in rocketry itself.”

In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev met the Russian space evangelist Fridrikh Tsander that same year. Korolev was then a newly-graduated “aeromechanical” engineer working on military aircraft. Tsander, six years earlier, had founded the “Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications” in Moscow. An early devotee of both Oberth and Tsiolkovsky, Tsander named his two children “Mercury” and “Astra” and greeted his colleagues with “Onward to Mars!” Korolev joined Tsander to found an amateur rocketry organization in 1931. By 1932, Korolev was leading the group. In 1933, they successfully launched the first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket. Celebrating, Korolev wrote in a flier that “Soviet rockets must conquer space!”

The interest in rocketry and spaceflight was not recreational. Nor was it military, though both amateur rocket organizations would be directly adopted into the R&D programs of the German and Soviet militaries. Rather, while their exact ideas differed widely, the rocketeers themselves all strongly believed that space travel would fundamentally transform humanity’s conception of itself and its place in the universe, necessarily transforming the future of human civilization to come. Space travel was a means to revolutionize not only economics or government, but humanity itself.

Tsiolkovsky, for example, purportedly said he only studied rocketry to assist his philosophical research. He believed that humanity was destined to expand throughout the cosmos, where life without gravity would allow us to evolve into a more perfect form, including by having much larger brains. He believed the existence of extraterrestrial life was axiomatically true and, moreover, that they were probably smarter than us, who are like “dogs and monkeys.” His sixteen-point plan for space exploration began with designing rocket planes and ended with the “achievement of individual and social perfection,” followed by interstellar colonization when the Sun begins to die in the distant future.

For Tsiolkovsky, an atheist and communist, the universe was strictly material. Humans were simply “marionettes, mechanical puppets” of the universe, but every atom was “alive.” He imagined living beings on the Moon and on asteroids, with humanity as but one of many manifestations of a single universal life. He wrote in 1911 that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” Tsiolkovsky would be read not just in Russia by Tsander, Korolev, and their future colleagues in the Soviet space program, but also by Wernher von Braun.

The Germans had their own ideas. In 1924, Oberth and Valier were exchanging letters, trying to figure out how to get to space. The first step, they agreed, was the publication of Oberth’s work in a form accessible to the layman. If it became popular, funds could be raised to build a rocket. Listing the key topics he would cover in his next book, Oberth noted the expected points on rocket physics and the speculative habitability of other planets. Point five, however, included “is there a soul,” “the enigma of the universe,” “mechanical effects for the phenomena of consciousness,” “telepathy,” “why do all religions locate the seat of the good angels up above,” “the fiasco of the religions of revelation,” and “parapsychologic experiments beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.”

Finishing this list, Oberth correctly noted that “one must think a great deal here,” if one “does not want to be immediately torn into one thousand shreds by uncomplimentary criticism.” In reply, Valier wisely advised Oberth to “dismiss your point five and all other delicate points without fail” if he wished to be taken seriously.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, it seems that Oberth heeded this advice. His next major work in 1929, Ways to Spaceflight, did not mention any of these “delicate” topics. But in a brief section discussing the reasons to explore Mars, Oberth—managing to cite both of the impenetrable German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Oswald Spengler—launched into an extended explanation of his “fundamental condition for human intelligence,” defined as acquiring rather than inheriting knowledge. He reasoned that, given the rarity of this quality among the animals of Earth, “it is highly improbable that this property should repeat itself anywhere else in the cosmos.” In contrast to Tsiolkovsky, Oberth imagined humanity as a uniquely intelligent animal in the universe, much as we are on the Earth itself.

Valier, for his part, was not trying to rain on Oberth’s parade. He wrote to Oberth that “what bids me personally to support your invention of the rocket” was to prove or disprove the pseudoscientific theory of glacial cosmogony, or the “world ice theory,” in which he strongly believed. This theory posited that, among other things, the asteroids, the Moon, and even the Milky Way galaxy were made of ice. The icy Moon periodically crashed into the Earth, which is what happened in the Biblical flood and was, furthermore, responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. For Valier, the new theory “means a new vision of the world and a new philosophy of life.” Valier’s advice to Oberth, it seems, was purely for PR reasons.

Willy Ley wrote in 1944 that the “great dream” of space travel was “philosophic wonder whether the Earth, and humanity on it, are alone in the universe or whether there are other earths with other humanities.” Ley would later become one of von Braun’s key allies in popularizing the nascent space program in the United States through articles, lectures, books, and, with the help of none other than Walt Disney, films and television programs too.

At its core, the appeal of the ambition to explore space was not scientific, economic, military, technological, or even just ambition for its own glorious sake. Rather, the first rocketeers had existential questions or anthropological visions, which they were convinced could be answered or manifested, respectively, through the exploration of space. Despite a diversity of views on what space might mean for humanity, they shared a conviction to discover the answer empirically with rocketry.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun wrote his one and only novel, Project Mars, about a near-future expedition to the Red Planet that discovers friendly, subterranean Martians from a dying civilization. In the book’s preface, he noted his intention was to “offer opportunities for ruminative philosophical reflection.” One of the main characters in the story addresses the future world government to argue for funding a Mars mission. He says “rocket scientists” were not motivated by the desire to build weapons, but “animated by secret visions of reaching into the heavens, of bringing their fellow men closer to what all our primitive ancestors felt was the outward manifestation of the Deity, and which was by them so worshiped.”

Speaking through his fictional characters, von Braun saw the rationale for space travel as fundamentally mystical and religious. He dismissed the arguments that great explorers or inventors throughout history were motivated by economic goals, but rather by “some mystic longing” and the “divine urge.” In von Braun’s telling, the arrival of human beings on Mars was, to the dying Martians, “but final confirmation of the universally held, deep, religious conviction that God had created Man in His own image, wherever Man was to be found.” It is humans who have “brought together the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism, which shall envelop the depths of space.”

The man who put Americans on the Moon was not overly concerned with whether space travel would create more jobs or lead to better consumer goods. Instead, he evidently believed that God himself had endorsed space colonization as the destiny of humanity, where, out there among the stars, we would no less than encounter our fellow believers. His character concludes a speech: “Only through God has the door to our neighbors in space been opened! Shall we slam it in His face?”

Why Space Still Holds Mysteries

Out of at least 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way, we have begun to explore only 1. We essentially rely on two technologies to reduce this ignorance: telescopes and rockets. Both face severe limitations in gaining meaningful information about the cosmos. The sheer vastness of space is by far the most significant limitation because it divides all space ambitions into interplanetary ones that can be accomplished within our own solar system and those that require interstellar travel to other stars. Even with roughly existing technology, we could conceivably send humans to the outer reaches of the solar system and back within one lifetime. A trip to Mars, for example, would take a couple of years.

But the star system nearest to ours, Alpha Centauri, is four light-years away—four times the distance that light, the fastest known thing in the universe, travels in one year. The fastest spacecraft we have ever launched into space would take 18,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years in diameter. Even if we could travel close to the speed of light, we would only ever cover a tiny fraction of the galaxy in one lifetime. It isn’t all bad news. There are roughly two thousand stars within fifty light-years of Earth. But right now, telescopes are somewhat more informative than rockets, since the light of even unfathomably distant stars has already traveled the distance.

If you try to stargaze during a full moon, you will discover that the light pollution from the Moon makes it impossible to see most stars. We have a similar problem with our view of the cosmos from even the dark places in our solar system: we can’t see anything because it’s all obscured by starlight, which makes it nearly impossible for us to see the relatively tiny and dim planets orbiting them. Our telescopes can easily observe stars and galaxies because they are so big and bright. But humans will never walk on stars or galaxies. We will walk on planets. The most pressing anthropological questions will be resolved at human scale, not galactic scale. For example, whether or not other habitable planets, extraterrestrial life, or alien civilizations exist, and what their exact nature is, are questions that are not likely to be answered satisfactorily without the ability to survey planets and planet-sized objects, whether from near or afar.

Since the 1990s, we have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. The dominant technique is called transit photometry. Simplified, a telescope observes a star until a planet passes in front of it, dimming the star’s brightness slightly. Observing the dimming, we can infer a planet exists. This technique has a big advantage: it also allows us to guess the temperature and atmospheric composition of the planet, two of the key factors for human habitability. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, has already been able to rule out the habitability of some planets this way.

One problem with transit photometry is that it can only observe planets in the direct line of sight between Earth and a far-away star. But the bigger problem is that, like all our techniques, it is indirect. The sizes, temperatures, orbits, and presumed atmospheres of extrasolar planets are important information. But such information about planet Earth would yield a very small proportion of all information about Earth that is relevant to humanity. It is useful to narrow down, through exclusion, the candidates for human-habitable planets in the galaxy. But we cannot use it to confirm habitability beyond reasonable doubt, nor does it tell us anything meaningful about the uninhabitable planets.

Temperature and atmosphere readings are meaningful only because we have a theory of life, based on our experience on Earth, that tells us life requires a certain temperature and atmosphere. But we have no experience of extraterrestrial life. Moreover, we know that our direct experience of the universe amounts to less than one out of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. The weight of our direct experience compared to the weight of our known ignorance should mean that, by default, we treat any thesis about the cosmos as effectively baseless speculation.

We are rather prone to do the opposite. For decades, large telescopes like the now-decommissioned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have been used to try to detect radio or laser transmissions from intelligent aliens. The search remains unsuccessful. The Fermi paradox asks why, if the stars and planets are so visibly numerous, we have not yet found convincing evidence of other advanced civilizations in the universe. The logical chain of reasoning in the Fermi paradox yields a universe replete with Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life, that has mysteriously failed to produce enough intelligent alien civilizations for at least one to be detected in a century. But this assumes far too much about the cosmos based only on the experiences of a single planet in a single solar system.

We have so little hard evidence about the cosmos that we can’t even say with confidence that other habitable planets exist anywhere else at all, let alone assume what the character and development of alien life, if it even exists, would be. If these assumptions are, in fact, grossly unjustified by default due to the unfavorable balance of given evidence compared to potential evidence, then it is not a paradox that we must resolve, but a profound ignorance that we must illuminate. How do we know that contemporary cosmology is not, in fact, as wrong as geocentrism was before Copernicus?

Unable to overcome hard physical challenges, our ability to generate new and increasingly esoteric theories has far outpaced our ability to actually collect physical evidence from the universe. Our stance towards space, in both theory and practice, has then not been the ideal program for understanding our place in the cosmos, but rather a way to cope with being unable to send people and probes to conduct human’s-eye view space empiricism in the field. What we are lacking is empirical science that goes out to collect evidence on which to base theories, rather than creating more elaborate theories to fit the scattershot evidence that we have and which we know is woefully insufficient. Any serious program of space exploration must always begin on the basis that the ultimate goal is interstellar travel to visit and survey extrasolar planets, no matter how hard that might be.

Whether through gigantic telescopes, robotic probes, or manned missions, such surveying will not merely incrementally advance the progress of natural science, but will tremendously strengthen or weaken all human theories, arguments, ideologies, beliefs, and visions of the future. If we find habitable planets with life chemically compatible with our own, the argument in favor of universal life becomes that much stronger. If not, how deeply can we adapt to truly exotic environments, and what kind of people will we become if we do? Whether alien civilizations make war is a literally existential question for the whole human species—assuming aliens exist at all. Thousand-year-old schools of thought will need to suddenly change or be rendered obsolete—new and trendy ones will too. There are many more transformative questions and more still that are currently unthinkable. Any one of them will permanently alter the trajectory of human civilization. It is also possible that the entire cosmos is as barren as the Moon. What then?

The Rise and Fall of Spacism

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky supported the Bolshevik Revolution and bequeathed his life’s work to the Soviet state. Wernher von Braun notoriously led the German missile program during World War II and was a member of the Allgemeine-SS. Yet, in one respect, both men were far closer to each other than to their nominal countrymen and co-ideologues. Their implacable focus on the transformative potential of space transcended other ideological commitments regarding class, race, or nation. What they really and effectively believed were different variants of spacism. This is no empty label: when the Soviets occupied Germany’s rocket facilities in 1945, they found their own classified pre-war rocket designs among von Braun’s personal belongings. The rocketeers in America, Germany, and the Soviet Union had, in fact, maintained correspondence with each other since the early 1920s, including with Robert Goddard.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the two most powerful states ever to exist—the United States and the Soviet Union—decided to explore space, devoting unprecedented resources and the state’s paramount legitimacy. Paradoxically, both states gave up on space in the 1970s, immediately after achieving a streak of the most technically and organizationally impressive feats in all of human history, beginning with the launch of the first-ever satellite Sputnik in 1957 and ending with the Apollo program that put the first men on the Moon. Only twelve people have ever walked on the Moon—the last in 1972, now over fifty years ago. Rather than the beginning of a new era in human history, the first man on the Moon became the end of one.

Just days after the Moon landing in 1969, Wernher von Braun was preparing plans for a manned Mars mission, with the public support of the Vice President. The plan included lunar orbital stations and surface bases, as well as a nuclear-powered shuttle for Earth-Moon transport. But in von Braun’s own words, “the question of what we are going to do […] once we get there, was a “weak point.” Though he made detailed plans, telling the U.S. Senate that ships would depart for Mars on precisely November 12, 1981, von Braun was personally skeptical that he could sell the Mars mission.

Outside the star-studded dinner party for the returning astronauts, hosted in Los Angeles by President Richard Nixon, protesters had hung a giant sign off a nearby building that said “Fuck Mars.” Democrats wanted social spending. Republicans, including Nixon, wanted to save money, especially for the Vietnam War. Neither cared to put transcendent visions above the mundane realities of political spending. Von Braun and his team believed NASA’s budget might need to double to make a Mars mission feasible. Instead, the 1971 government budget slashed NASA spending to a level that could not sustain the production of the powerful Saturn V rockets, which had carried men to the Moon, let alone provide enough funds to put men on Mars. Depressed, von Braun retired from NASA in 1972.

The Moon landing did not actually diminish the ambitions of the Soviets, who, under Korolev, had always regarded the Moon as a secondary goal to Venus or Mars. But Korolev died of health problems in 1966 at the age of just 59. His successor presided over four catastrophic launch failures of the Soviet answer to the Saturn V, the N1-L3 rocket, upon which rested any Soviet dreams of Moon landings or beyond. Starting in 1974, the rocket program was not just suspended and then canceled by Soviet leadership, but the rockets were physically destroyed on the orders of Valentin Glushko, Korolev’s erstwhile rival and the new head of the program.

Not only were Soviet political leaders averse to the long-term spending required for a Mars mission but they were rumored to be afraid that a successful launch of the N1 would also necessitate greater immediate spending. They literally preferred not to succeed. Given the demonstrated aversion of both the U.S. and Soviet governments to allotting the requisite resources for space exploration, the question is rather why they agreed to expensive space programs in the first place.

The credit for starting the Space Race, in fact, goes to Sergei Korolev, who first secured government support for non-military applications of rockets. In 1953, armed with some suggestive American newspaper clippings, he argued to his superiors that the U.S. was planning to launch the first-ever satellite into orbit, but that his team could beat them to it. In reality, the U.S. was years away from doing so. Von Braun had not yet even met Walt Disney.

Korolev, for the first time, formally requested that the Soviet government support “the study of interplanetary space.” He wasted no time organizing a coalition, enlisting both the Soviet Academy of Sciences and top members of the military, whom he knew professionally, to lend their support. The key report concluded with a discussion of manned spaceflight, building an orbital space station, and a mission to the Moon. Arguing the potential military applications, Korolev got the approval of the defense minister and of Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov. With Stalin still recently dead, Korolev played his cards just right.

The U.S. entry into the Space Race thus essentially followed the culmination of Korolev’s successful deployment of his social capital and persuasive skill in the Soviet government. Following the launch of Sputnik, NASA was created in early 1958 with President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal support as a response to the perceived threat—and accompanying panic—of Soviet technological advancements represented by the satellite. In 1960, von Braun and his team were transferred from the military to NASA. With his famous 1961 speech declaring America would put a man on the Moon, President John F. Kennedy invested his tremendous political capital into the space program, but, ultimately, only as a means of demonstrating superiority over the Soviet Union.

The Space Race was the result of a few key live players like Korolev persuading and, to some degree, disingenuously frightening their governments that an ideological and geopolitical enemy might obtain a military advantage. While their private motivations were to pursue space exploration for anthropological reasons, they did not argue this view to governments in asking for support. As a result, the governments never actually adopted space exploration as a worthy goal in and of itself.

The Space Race era gave way to a relative thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, with the first talks and treaties to limit ICBMs beginning in the late 1960s. Since the space program was instrumental to military goals, a decrease in military tensions threatened its funding. When it had outlived its usefulness in the 1970s, the funding was predictably withdrawn by both states. From von Braun’s perspective, it was only Kennedy’s intervention and resounding endorsement that had made the Apollo program possible in the first place. According to von Braun, the future space program needed defense “with philosophical if not religious zeal,” but Washington was only interested in cost-effectiveness.

Space exploration, however, was never just a government program. It was also a set of beliefs and ambitions. What must be explained is not only why governments wound down spending, but why this new and potent proposition failed to attract more—and more powerful—adherents who would find new justifications for its continuation. Despite being the greatest act of “propaganda of the deed” in human history, the Moon landing decisively failed to persuade the relevant decision-makers of the time that a Mars mission was worth pursuing next.

Both budgets and programs were cut. No political player in the U.S. intervened to preserve von Braun’s government career and, in the Soviet Union, none intervened to preserve Korolev’s rockets. To this day, NASA arguably only still exists because the U.S. government doesn’t know how to delete bureaucracies. Why did successful space exploration fail to persuade that it was worth the expense? An underrated explanation is that space exploration apparently failed on its own anthropological terms.

From roughly the 1890s to the 1960s, there was a genuine and tangible mystery within our own solar system that was large enough to leave space for Martian civilizations. For a time, believing in life on Mars—even intelligent life—was an intellectually defensible, if outré, position. During the turn of the century, the American astronomer Percival Lowell, the scion of a very prominent Boston family, made a name for himself by arguing that he had discovered intricate networks of canals on Mars through his observatory, popularizing the idea of alien civilizations.

Nikola Tesla himself was convinced that he had once received radio communications from the Martians. Guglielmo Marconi, the famed inventor of radio, also once floated the theory that Martians were sending messages to Earth. In 1924, when Mars came into its closest proximity to Earth in a century, the U.S. Navy requested all its radio stations to report any “electrical phenomenon” of “unusual character.” As late as 1960, President Eisenhower’s science advisor Fred Singer was speculating that the Martian moon Phobos might be of artificial origin. Von Braun himself had used the idea of Martians in Project Mars.

The appeal of this at the time was the same as that of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—though tarnished after decades—is today: intelligent living beings, new technology, superior ethics, and answers about the nature of life, consciousness, and the universe. All of this, and its eternally transformative potential on humanity, was perhaps within our grasp. But the success of space exploration led to its own defeat. By 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe had captured the first photos of Mars from space, with no canals to be found, let alone Martians. By 1976, the Viking 1 rover had successfully landed on Mars. The Soviets, meanwhile, had landed rovers on Venus and sent back photos of the surface.

The lack of evidence for any advanced life in the solar system only became more obvious while we slowly came to terms with the difficulty of interstellar travel. Our solar system looks dead and barren; had we discovered Martians or anything else of interest, it is hard to see how this wouldn’t have become the central defining feature of all political, intellectual, and perhaps even economic life since. But we never did. We’re less sure of the universe as a whole, but our confidence has been wounded. Scientists and engineers themselves, not just political or economic elites, lost interest in the heavens and turned inward towards other goals. Without an attainable promise of transforming humanity, how could space exploration regain its appeal?

The Economics and Politics of Space Exploration

It is possible that there are no good economic reasons to explore space. Resource extraction on other planetary bodies, such as asteroid mining, sounds like the strongest economic justification for space exploration in principle since there is far more matter out there than down here. For example, the asteroid 16 Psyche has been estimated to contain $10 quintillion worth of minerals like nickel and iron—this is 400,000 times the entire annual GDP of the United States.Energy generation in space, such as by solar power satellites, has similarly overwhelming fundamentals. The Sun’s light easily contains enough energy to power civilizations thousands of times more energy-hungry than ours. 

The main economic problem is not the untold capital investment, technological advancement, or long-term coordination necessary to make use of these resources, but rather that it is unclear what anyone would do with $10 quintillion worth of nickel or unlimited solar energy. 16 Psyche is perhaps about 10 million billion tons of iron and nickel. For comparison, the whole world produced 2.6 billion tons of iron in 2022. We might make iron and nickel effectively free. But to what end? Far from the limits to growth being the limits of a single planet, we, despite propaganda to the contrary, do not have an economy that voraciously consumes resources. Such gargantuan inputs of matter and energy are important for an industrial economy that is growing faster than its resource base. Ours is a sluggish economy that has grown slowly, if at all, since 1971.

We live in a world where developed countries are both deindustrializing and facing structural population decline. Governments and international organizations deliberately aim to reduce industrial activity and energy consumption for environmental reasons. Fertility rates continue to decline in both the developed and developing worlds and the future expected human population declines along with them. Whether we look at China, India, or even Africa, it seems that, counterintuitively, developing countries might decline demographically before they ever reach the living standards of the developed world. No country, including China, has a vision of development that surpasses that of the currently developed world.

At the same time as our total expected resource consumption faces an immediate and long-term decline, the Earth is nowhere close to depleting its natural resources. Relatively straightforward technological advances like fracking, as well as simply more surveying and resource exploration, have led to estimates of reserves of everything from fossil fuels to rare earth elements being repeatedly revised up, even in unexpected places like the Mediterranean Sea. Were demand ever to rise high enough, we would most likely be able to acquire far more than enough of any natural resource on Earth through further surveying and capital investment, at a far smaller cost than would be needed to acquire it in space.

From a cosmic perspective, this is perhaps unsurprising. In the Earth’s crust, there are about 3.4 billion metric tons of matter for every living person. Even abundant energy is currently achievable here on Earth, such as through nuclear power. The effectiveness of nuclear fission also weakens the appeal of, say, mining the Moon for helium-3 to power fusion reactors. All such economic justifications for space exploration then amount to creating a limitless supply for which there is no demand.

There could exist a civilization with such vast demands for matter and energy that space exploration becomes economically attractive through simple Malthusian logic. But this is not our civilization, nor is there any reason to think it will be in the future without deliberate and extensive social, political, cultural, and institutional re-engineering. Our civilization has abundant minerals and energy within its grasp right here on Earth but has no use for them. There is no reason to think space resources are different.

Aside from resource extraction, there are plausible economic reasons for activity in or near the Earth’s orbit, such as operating satellites. But the hard part is justifying activity in space that isn’t self-justifying due to its proximity to all the good stuff on Earth. An obvious proposal is space tourism. Done right, an orbital habitat could blow Dubai or Singapore out of the water as a luxury destination. Once it became old hat, you could build small luxury destinations on or around the Moon, Mars, and further beyond. This would create the demand for other space activity and infrastructure, like better rockets, life support systems, and space mining. It could also be a profitable motive for a private company, even under conditions of industrial and demographic decline.

The only question is if there is really enough demand for space tourism to pay the cost of creating the supply. Building even the initial infrastructure for such tourism could be beyond the ability of any private company. Our first steps into space have already been monumentally expensive. From 1959 to 1972, NASA cost about 2.2 percent of U.S. federal expenditure. Wernher von Braun was working with today’s equivalent of roughly a $138 billion annual budget to get us to the Moon, ultimately successfully. For comparison, NASA’s annual budget today is about $25 billion, only one-fifth of this. The recent Artemis program to return to the Moon will likely cost over $100 billion in total. The International Space Station is sometimes called the single most expensive man-made object ever created, at an estimated $150 billion or more.

These costs, measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, are comparable only to a few spending programs like social security ($1.2 trillion) or the U.S. military ($751 billion). Needless to say, these are government programs. The only companies with annual profits higher than $100 billion are Apple and Saudi Aramco. SpaceX, the premier institution leading humanity to space right now, has a total valuation that is only $137 billion. The costs of space activity can be brought down significantly through technological innovation, private management, and economies of scale, as SpaceX itself has shown by reducing the price per mass of launches to orbit. But this has been done largely in the context of being a government contractor for NASA. Outside of satellites, effectively the entire space industry relies on government funding.

It is no surprise then that a growing list of space tourism and asteroid mining companies have been founded and have failed, though this probably speaks more to the blind enthusiasm for space than its actual economics. It is also possible that tourism is inherently only a follow-on industry that takes advantage of capital investments and R&D made by other institutions with more willingness and ability to successfully invest in expensive, long-term projects—like governments.

Governments can justify effectively unlimited funds for space exploration on the basis of increasing military power, as happened in the original Space Race. It always makes military sense to have communications and surveillance satellites, or perhaps spaceborne missile silos, that are a little bit farther away and a little bit harder to detect, obstruct, or destroy by an enemy. This can eventually justify the economic infrastructure to maintain and develop such military space systems, which might include Moon or Mars colonies.

But a military motivation puts space progress entirely at the whims of terrestrial geopolitics. When geopolitical tensions cool down, space is the first program to have its funding cut. This is exactly what happened from the 1970s until the 2010s, when Cold War détente, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then the hope of peaceful globalization resulted in space progress not only stopping but sometimes reversing. As of 2023, it looks like the U.S. government has once again decided to support space exploration: NASA has tapped Lockheed Martin for nuclear propulsion, while Elon Musk defies gravity as a major government contractor who publicly criticizes U.S. foreign policy.

It is no coincidence that this shift happened at the same time that the U.S. government collectively decided that China was no longer just a far-off trade partner, but a geopolitical and ideological rival to the United States. The U.S. Space Force and the Artemis program to return to the Moon were launched by President Donald Trump, whose unprecedented hawkishness on China was quietly adopted by Washington and continued after he left office. At the same time, China’s space program launched its own space station in Earth orbit, landed a rover on Mars, and is planning not only to land men on the Moon but to build a permanent Moon base. There is little doubt they will eventually succeed. The Chinese space program, even if it were entirely civilian, threatens the prestige of the U.S. as the leading superpower, so it cannot go unchallenged.

But advocates of space exploration should not celebrate this turn of events too enthusiastically. Once again, space progress is being adopted instrumentally for geopolitical reasons, not on its own merits. The U.S. and China are increasingly on a trajectory for military conflict, perhaps over Taiwan, perhaps over something else. Were a war to occur, the victor would almost certainly lose all interest in expensive space investments all over again. In our own lifetimes, we might live to see permanent Moon bases—and then permanently abandoned Moon bases.

Finally, there is no political justification for interplanetary activity, in the sense of leaving Earth for a new life on Mars free from the interference of Earthly mores, laws, and governments. The pressures and dangers of life in artificial habitats, whether on a planet or in orbit, will necessitate strict protocols for behavior, which will be enforced through pervasive surveillance. The systems used to enforce discipline will just as easily be used to enforce political discipline. All such systems will be ultimately controlled from Earth, first because they will be instituted under organizations based on and beholden to Earth, and later because Earth missiles fly fast.

Political independence is actually achieved either past interstellar distances, or by pulling off a truly self-sustaining colony right before a catastrophic decline in Earth civilization that renders it unable to maintain interplanetary missiles. This could be engineered—that is to say, an armed space colony could acquire and preemptively use catastrophic weapons on Earth. But this means that, fittingly for the planet of the God of War, there are no libertarian motives for emigrating to Mars, only militarist ones.

The engineering and logistics breakthroughs that would be made through a large-scale interplanetary expansion are almost certainly a prerequisite for interstellar travel. In practice, these have only been led by governments or government contractors, because there is in fact no good economic justification for large-scale expansion of human activity in interplanetary space, and governments have only made these vast investments for instrumental and extremely unreliable geopolitical or military reasons, which are incompatible with the continuous and generational work that would be necessary for a multi-planetary civilization. In the end, the only pure and reliable justification for interplanetary expansion is its potential to transform human civilization, particularly as the launchpad for interstellar exploration and expansion, but this is precisely the justification that governments have never adopted.

Don’t Panic

The project of interstellar civilization may seem incomprehensibly vast, beyond the ability of anyone to influence. But it is not inevitable. Like any great work, it will only occur through planned and deliberate human action. Given the scale of distances involved, we will need to carry out the work not only with unprecedented ingenuity and mobilization of people and resources but also with generational continuity of mission and succession. This will need to be done without the expectation of economic profit or military advantage. There are many precedents for such projects in history, but they have only been carried out successfully by two kinds of institutions, usually working together: governments and religions.

In all recorded history, states have basically only acted on three motivations: national security, economic growth, and political legitimacy. The first two are unreliable or incoherent for interstellar civilization. The third, however, fits like a charm. Legitimacy is as vital to states as economic or military security. As a result, states have spent immeasurable quantities of resources, for decades and even centuries, on projects that, at first glance, seem to have had no material purpose or value. Think of the bronze ding of ancient China, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe. These projects were not, in fact, useless but fulfilled the need for legitimacy according to the beliefs, values, and tastes of the peoples who built them. In that sense, they were priceless.

The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.

More importantly, the sociological challenge of persuading a whole society to migrate into the unknown is very different from that of an explorer’s mission, which needs only the promise of adventure. Like the ancient Israelites, the Pilgrims, or the Mormons, a great migration will only occur when a Promised Land has been credibly found. Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough. Whether with colossal space telescopes or ultra-fast nano-probes armed with cameras, we will need to have beautiful images and real maps of alien worlds before human civilization can become interstellar. The purpose of interplanetary expansion is to build the infrastructure and technology to make such scopes and probes feasible. These will be our cathedrals, the legacy which we will leave to our descendants.

Modern governments are often wrongly derided for lacking vision. In fact, they are already committed to multi-trillion-dollar, multi-decade-long visions that require all of society, technology, and world geopolitics to be back-engineered accordingly. The U.S. government, for example, spends half its budget on social welfare programs, especially for the elderly. We take for granted that this is unremarkable when, in fact, it is extremely historically unusual and a reflection of our deep commitment to a certain kind of post-industrial society that existentially values comfort and individuality. There is no economic or military benefit to social security, but the U.S. government will use the full force of the U.S. economy and military to defend the system that maintains it. Other goals are possible too.

Rather than a government or religion, perhaps a new kind of institution yet to be invented will be able to take humanity to the stars. But such an institution would need to be capable of organizing people, spending resources, and maintaining its mission on a scale that would rival even the governments of the U.S. or China today. Family dynasties might offer a useful model here. But there is functionally no path to such a powerful institution peacefully coexisting with today’s governments, so it would require a civilization that is orders of magnitude more industrially, demographically, and technologically advanced, where a government that can spend the equivalent of hundreds of trillions can coexist with private institutions that can spend mere trillions.

It is also possible that only a society that treats the pursuit of interstellar civilization as its central legitimating project, from which the legitimacy of all other institutions and ideas is derived, will ever succeed at actually building it. To advocate for space exploration on the back of instrumental economic or military justifications is ultimately more like a trick or a hack than an honest and sustainable long-term position. There is no reason to omit the potential of space to transform humanity for the better, which is ultimately the core and only durable reason to aim for interstellar civilization. Whatever may be out there, however it may change us—there is a golden path to a destiny among the stars. Isn’t it worth following?

But artificial general intelligence is not the type of intelligence that humanity should fear most. Far from the blinking server rooms of Silicon Valley or the posh London offices of DeepMind, another type of intelligence lurks silently out of human sight, biding its time in the Lovecraftian deep. Watching. Waiting. Organizing. Unlike artificial intelligence, this intelligence is not hypothetical, but very real. Forget about AGI. It’s time to worry about OGI—octopus general intelligence.

In late 2017, it was reported that an underwater site called “Octlantis” had been discovered by researchers off the coast of Australia. Normally considered to be exceptionally solitary, fifteen octopuses were observed living together around a rocky outcropping on the otherwise flat ocean floor. Fashioning homes—dens—for themselves out of shells, the octopuses were observed mating, fighting, and communicating with each other. Most importantly, this was not the first time that this had happened. Another similar site called “Octopolis” had been previously discovered in the vicinity in 2009.

One of the researchers, Stephanie Chancellor, described the octopuses in “Octlantis” as “true environmental engineers.” The octopuses were observed conducting both mate defense and “evictions” of octopuses from dens, defending their property rights from infringement by other octopuses. The other “Octopolis” site had been continuously inhabited for at least seven years. Given the short lifespans of octopuses, lasting only a few years on the high end, it is clear that “Octopolis” has been inhabited by several generations of octopuses. We are presented with the possibility of not only one multi-generational octopus settlement chosen for defense from predators and engineered for octopus living, but two. And those are just the ones we’ve discovered. The oceans cover over 70% of Earth’s surface.

None of the three experts I spoke with for this article would rule out the possibility of further octopus settlements.

The octopus is a well-known creature, but poorly understood. The primal fear inspired by the octopus frequently surfaces in horror movies, pirate legends, political cartoons depicting nefarious and tentacled political enemies, and, understandably, in Japanese erotic art. For all that, the octopus is, to most people, just another type of seafood you can order at the sushi bar. But the octopus is more than just sushi. It’s more than the sum of its eight arms. A lot more, in fact—it may be the most alien creature larger than a speck of dust to inhabit the known ecosystems of the planet Earth. Moreover, it’s not just strange. It’s positively talented.

Octopuses can fully regenerate limbs. They can change the color and texture of their skin at will, whether to camouflage themselves, make a threat, or for some other unknown purpose. They can even “see” with their skin, thanks to the presence of the light-sensitive protein rhodopsin, also found in human retinas. They can shoot gobs of thick black ink with a water jet, creating impenetrable smokescreens for deceit and escape. Octopuses can use their boneless, elastic bodies to shapeshift, taking on the forms of other animals or even rocks. Those same bodies allow even the larger species of octopuses to squeeze through holes as small as one inch in diameter. The octopus’ arms are covered in hundreds of powerful suckers that are known to leave visible “octo-hickeys” on humans. The larger ones can hold at least 35 lbs. each. The suckers can simultaneously taste and smell. All octopus species are venomous.

Despite all of these incredible abilities, the octopus’ most terrifying feature remains its intelligence. The octopus has the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any invertebrate, a ratio that is also higher than that of many vertebrates. Two thirds of its neurons, however, are located in its many autonomous arms, which can react to stimuli and even identify and grab food after being severed from the rest of the octopus, whether still dead or alive. In other words, the intelligence of an octopus is not centralized. It is decentralized, like a blockchain. Like blockchains, this makes them harder to kill. It has been reported that octopuses are capable of observational learning, short- and long-term memory, tool usage, and much more. One might wonder: if octopuses have already mastered blockchain technology, what else are they hiding?

We can see octopuses frequently putting this intelligence to good use, and not only in their burgeoning aquatic settlements. Some octopuses are known to use coconut shells for shelter, even dismantling and transporting the shell only to reassemble it later. In laboratory settings, octopuses are able to solve complex puzzles and open different types of latches in order to obtain food. They don’t stop there, though. Captive octopuses have been known to escape their tanks, slither across the floor, climb into another tank, feast on the helpless fish and crabs within, and then return to their original tank. Some do it only at night, knowingly keeping their human overseers in the dark. Octopuses do not seem to have qualms about deceiving humans. They are known to steal bait from lobster traps and climb aboard fishing boats to get closer to fishermen’s catches.

One octopus in New Zealand even managed to escape an aquarium and make it back to the sea. When night fell and nobody was watching, “Inky”—his human name, as we do not know how octopuses refer to themselves in private—climbed out of his tank, across the ground, and into a drainpipe leading directly to the ocean.

Given the advanced intelligence and manifold abilities of octopuses, it may not be a surprise, in hindsight, that they are developing settlements off the coast of Australia. By establishing a beachhead in the Pacific Ocean, a nascent octopus civilization would be well-placed to challenge the primary geopolitical powers of the 21st century, namely, the United States and China. Australia itself is sparsely inhabited and rich in natural resources vital for any advanced civilization. The country’s largely coastal population would be poorly prepared to deal with an invasion from the sea.

I spoke with Piero Amodio, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge who has been interviewed by The New York Times on his research into octopus intelligence. “[Octopuses] live in almost all marine habitats, from ocean depths to shallow waters, and from tropical to polar regions,” he said. “The fact that octopuses tend to have a solitary lifestyle is something extremely interesting because they differ from many other groups of large-brained animals.” Amodio linked me to a paper documenting food and den sharing among octopuses. What if they are, in fact, not so different? What if they become social on a scale matching or surpassing humans? Is humanity prepared to grapple with an organized challenge rising from all corners of the globe?

This new information does raise one important question: what are the state of human-octopus relations, and how might they develop in the future? Currently, octopuses are more than just aware of us. They are able to recognize individual human beings and develop preferences for them. If you are on good terms with an octopus, you may be grabbed and pulled into a tank, perhaps for a hospitable visit to the den. Alternately, you may be blasted and soaked with cold water. No octo-hickeys for you. Although many octopuses have shown obvious displeasure with captivity, they are fortunately not generally known to attack humans. There is, however, video footage of at least one dangerous altercation with a human diver. Graziano Fiorito, a senior researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, told me that aggression is “very rare” and done in self-defense. But with an animal as intelligent and disciplined as the octopus, could that same peaceful nature become warlike aggression if provoked?

Roko’s Basilisk is a well-known thought experiment postulating that a supremely powerful artificial intelligence might retroactively punish humans who did not work to bring it into existence. In this light, it is fortunate that octopuses have been legally protected by animal welfare laws during experimentation—the only invertebrates to receive this protection. We can only imagine what horrible, tentacled punishments for humanity may have been avoided in the event of an octopus intelligence singularity.

Animal welfare laws notwithstanding, human-octopus relations are clearly insufficiently advanced to guarantee stable and productive cooperation in the future. Octopus meat remains a fixture of many national cuisines. Octopus farming is a major industry, despite warnings and objections from the scientific community. Not one national government in the world has clarified its policies regarding octopus civilization. (Emails to the White House requesting the administration’s comment on this matter went unanswered.)

The first step to improving human-octopus relations would be a global shutdown of all consumption and internment, whether for research or commercial purposes, of octopuses. As this plan is patently unrealistic and completely absurd, more creative solutions will have to be developed in order to route around sclerotic global institutions unwilling or unable to meet the challenge of intelligent cephalopod life. One option may be to establish persistent contact with leaders in the octopus community to communicate our goodwill. While the linguistic barrier remains an unsolved problem, the incentives to solve it are enormous. Cultural and scientific exchange with octopuses could greatly enrich humanity’s understanding of undersea life, blockchain technology, and non-standard tactile numeracies.

Hostile approaches must also remain on the table in case peaceable cooperation proves to be impossible. Although the advents of aviation and long-range missiles have rendered coastal fortifications somewhat deprecated in modern military conflict, human regimes would do well to bolster their brown water borders in the event of a kinetic assault by octopodal forces. Extension of maritime frontiers into international waters would also provide a much-needed geopolitical buffer zone, provided it did not veer into encroachment upon cephalopod territory. With powerful suckers studding an arm span up to 4 meters long, distance is key to defense from the octopus. Sanctions could prove useful in denying octopuses any strategic reserves of coconut shells or other armor.

There is a more speculative moonshot option as well. Given the relatively short lifespans of octopuses, it would be possible to intern a number of them in a research station with the goal of selectively breeding them for intelligence, combat aptitude, and most importantly, loyalty to humans. With adequate funding, a team could make significant progress in just a few decades towards developing a new species of killer octopus bred to defend humanity against the threat of a rival octopus civilization. Just as OpenAI took the lead in confronting the problem of artificial intelligence by aiming to deliberately develop friendly AI, OctoAI may need to take the lead in confronting the problem of octopus intelligence by developing it ourselves in a humanity-friendly direction. We may have to fight ink with ink.

A moonshot project such as this has the added perk that it could be easily funded and carried out by a rogue government agency or single eccentric billionaire, such as SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. The Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, for example, would provide an ideal research site. They are a short boat ride away from the capital of unconventional moonshot projects in Silicon Valley, as well as being located in the natural territory of the Giant Pacific Octopus. The islands’ status as a nature preserve would provide a convenient cover story for the public. Intruders, spies, and conscientious objectors could be thrown into the octopus tank for disposal and their disappearances blamed on harsh Pacific weather. In fact, given the ideal conditions of the site, this may already be happening. Is it a coincidence that the Farallon Islands are closed to the public?

If all fallbacks fail, mutually assured destruction will be the only surefire way to prevent octopus civilization from annihilating humanity and conquering the cosmos. “I tend to think that future-of-evolution questions are always limited by how long this planet continues to sustain life,” said Joseph Vitti, a doctoral student at Harvard University who has published on cephalopod cognition. “I tend to think that a natural or man-made disaster could easily wipe us out before enough evolutionary time passes for such major changes [in octopus social systems] to occur in the coleoid cephalopod lineage.” If we cannot save ourselves, we just may have to produce such a man-made disaster in order to save the rest of the universe.

The future may look bleak. Just as our social institutions enter a time of stagnation, crisis and despair, a heavily armed challenger surfaces from the untraversed depths. But humanity has faced terrible problems before and emerged not only victorious, but stronger too. To survive, our governing institutions will need to have robust but flexible coordination, quick and skilled decision-making, and the capacity for subterfuge, dissimulation, and intelligence. Just like the octopus. And that is what Palladium Magazine is all about.

This story is satire. It’s April 1st. All quotes, however, are real, as are more of the octopus facts than you would like to believe.