Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It

 From Mars to the metaverse, tech moguls are forging a new kind of capitalism: an extreme, extraterrestrial version.

...As a teenager, he read Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”; he plans to name the first SpaceX rocket to Mars after the crucial spaceship in the story, the Heart of Gold. “Hitchhiker’s Guide” doesn’t have a metaverse, but it does have a planet called Magrathea, whose inhabitants build an enormous computer to ask it a question about “life, the universe and everything.” After millions of years, it answers, “Forty-two.” Mr. Musk says that the book taught him that “if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.” But that is not the only lesson of “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” which also didn’t start out as a book. Adams wrote it for BBC Radio 4, and, starting in 1978, it was broadcasted all over the world — including to Pretoria.

“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich and, on the whole, tax-free,” the narrator intones at the beginning of an early episode. “Many men, of course, became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.” “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” in other words, is an extended and very, very funny indictment of economic inequality, a science-fiction tradition that stretches all the way back to the dystopias of H.G. Wells, a socialist... Jill Lepore, nyt

But spacefaring could be a moral equivalent of war, couldn't it?