Sociotechnical Scale| “Making Life Multiplanetary”: Promise and Imperative of Scaling

Abstract

Since as early as 2001, the tagline “making life multiplanetary” has been central to Elon Musk’s narratives for his space-colonizing ventures. In this article, I show how Musk legitimizes such ventures through the discursive invocations of scale. Across his public addresses, Musk repeatedly frames a multiplanetary future at once as a promise of scale—as a future whose scale could future-proof civilizational continuity—and an imperative to scale toward a future that demands continual motions of scaling against the timeline of human extinction. Taken together, it is through scale talks that Musk rationalizes the acceleration and expansion of his outer space ventures as the continual motion en route to a promised end—all the while deflecting from what was foreclosed and left behind in the shadow of his scale-making. Ultimately, what is advanced is not a future on its way to be materially scaled toward but the spectacle of scaling as fantasy.