The Mars exit strategy

How eco-anxiety, gender trouble, and founder leadership reshaped the climate imaginary

Martin Heidegger warned that modern technology no longer allows us to simply “harness the wind” in a passive or attuned manner. Rather than engaging nature as something that gives, technological modernity positions it as standing-reserve: a repository of resources ordered in advance for extraction and use.

Are we home?

This mode of relating to the world presupposes two conditions. First, the existence of Heimat—a sense of home that includes familiarity, belonging, memory, and community. Second, the assumption that the resources sustaining this home are effectively infinite. Even well into the Industrial Revolution and the postwar expansion of mass consumption—cars, plastics, chemicals, oil—the world still appeared vast enough to absorb exploitation without consequence. The 1973 oil crisis marked a first global rupture in this illusion, exposing the vulnerability of industrial economies to finite resources. Yet early scientific warnings were easily ignored: ecological damage was displaced to colonies and peripheries, and inconvenient data was sidelined whenever economic progress was at stake.

By the late 2010s, climate discourse underwent a decisive shift. What had long remained an abstract environmental concern became a pervasive affective condition marked by grief, fatigue, and temporal foreclosure. Among younger generations in particular, it was common to hear expressions of resignation—“it doesn’t matter anymore.” Often described as eco-anxiety, this mood was less about imminent catastrophe than about the erosion of a livable future. Intensified by apocalyptic media narratives and the moral clarity of youth-led climate activism—most visibly embodied by Greta Thunberg—environmental awareness ceased to be merely informational and became existential. Loss, responsibility, and the collapse of long-standing progress narratives could no longer be held at a distance.

This affective shift may have catalyzed what Yuk Hui identifies as an unexpected inflection of Heimat: Heimatlosigkeit, the loss of Earth as home. What emerges here is a fundamental tension between two responses to planetary crisis—repair versus further progress. Repair implies acknowledgment, reversal, restraint: a reworking of philosophical commitments and systemic infrastructures that produced the crisis. Yet alongside this ethic of repair, a different response gained traction—one that promised salvation not through reconfiguration, but through acceleration.

It’s gender trouble, bro

In the 2010s, amid post-2008 institutional distrust, platform-mediated celebrity, and mounting civilizational anxiety, a renewed fascination with hyper-masculine, founder-led authority took shape, intensifying after 2016. Figures such as Elon Musk came to personify a builder-savior archetype: decisive, risk-embracing, technologically sovereign, and positioned against bureaucratic inertia, liberal technocracy, and perceived cultural softness. Thriving in online arenas where irony collapsed into sincerity and meritocratic myths fused with spectacle, leadership was reimagined less as care or governance than as the capacity to act unilaterally under conditions of perceived urgency.

This resurgence of founder-led masculinity also unfolded against a broader moment of gender destabilization. Drawing on R. W. Connell’s account of hegemonic masculinity, the late 2010s can be read as a period in which dominant masculine scripts—authority, rational mastery, technological competence—were perceived as being under symbolic threat. The expansion of gender discourse into mainstream politics—around pronouns, identity, and the contestation of binary norms—produced what many experienced not simply as cultural pluralization, but as epistemic instability. Within this context, hyper-masculine leadership figures functioned as compensatory anchors: embodiments of coherence, decisiveness, and technical sovereignty at a moment when gender itself appeared newly negotiable. What emerged was not a rejection of gender trouble, but its displacement—away from institutions and deliberation, and into individualized, spectacular figures who promised clarity through action rather than negotiation.

By the late 2010s (especially around 2019) it became widely accepted in public and media discourse that Musk, through Tesla, had arguably done more to accelerate real-world decarbonization than any single state-led initiative, transforming climate action from policy aspiration into market reality.

This narrative, however compelling, risks outsourcing planetary responsibility to heroic capitalism, converting systemic decarbonization into an individualized achievement while leaving extractive logics, growth imperatives, and geopolitical asymmetries largely intact.

That same year thus crystallized two divergent responses to eco-anxiety: on one side, Thunberg’s call for regulation, behavioral change, and systemic restraint; on the other, Musk’s technological interventionism, whose electric vehicles delivered measurable atmospheric relief at unprecedented scale. While the goal was shared, the ethos and pathos could not have been more different.

The loss of home

There is, however, a critical asymmetry. As early as 2011–2012, Musk began framing Mars not as science fiction but as a concrete destination. In 2016, this vision was formalized with the presentation of the Interplanetary Transport System—a civilizational project complete with technical architecture, cost logic, and demographic ambition. From that point on, Mars was no longer imagined as a possibility, but as an inevitability. It is here, precisely, that Heimatlosigkeit becomes operational.

Once Mars is framed as destination, Earth is recast as corridor. Musk need not arrive there; it suffices to circulate the promise at a moment when Earth itself feels increasingly untenable. Belonging is displaced by transit, repair by escape velocity. A planet understood as provisional will never be cared for—only tolerated, optimized, and used. In this sense, the interplanetary imagination does not break with the logic of standing-reserve that Heidegger described; it extends it beyond Earth, completing the loss of home it was meant to overcome.

References

Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. University of California Press.

Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859.

Heidegger, M. (1977). “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row.

Hui, Y. (2020). The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic.

Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press.

Thunberg, G. (2019). Speech at the World Economic Forum, Davos.

International Energy Agency (various years). EV adoption and emissions displacement reports.

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