Adams was in good company. For more than a century, many science fiction writers had used plots involving founding colonies on other planets as a way to indict imperialism on Earth. (Imperialists, for their part, liked to talk about colonizing space, too: Cecil Rhodes himself said, “I would annex the planets if I could.”)
That young Elon Musk read Hitchhiker’s Guide in South Africa and, failing to perceive its indictment of apartheid, took it as a lesson in the importance of asking the right question is hardly surprising. He was a kid. It’s that he stuck to that interpretation into his late middle age that’s odd, especially because much of the book today reads like a spoof of Musk himself.
The antihero of Hitchhiker’s Guide is Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed, three-armed megalomaniac, voted “Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time,” inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, once called “the Best Bang since the Big One,” and part-time president of the Imperial Galactic Government, a mere figurehead, chosen not by voters but by the government to serve as a diversion from its criminality, and therefore “the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage.” Beeblebrox tours the galaxy on a spaceship he has stolen, the Heart of Gold, getting into one scrape after another in order to distract everyone from the fact that the galaxy is in fact run by shadowy corporations like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, which manufactures not only spaceships but also computers and robots with GPP, Genuine People Personalities.
Beeblebrox is also the only being ever to survive the Total Perspective Vortex. When you enter the Vortex, you get a total perspective on your place in the universe, and of course you discover that you are galactically insignificant. This knowledge annihilates your brain. But not Beeblebrox, who discovers himself “to be the most important being in the entire Universe, something he had hitherto only suspected.”
Decades after reading Hitchhiker’s Guide, when Musk was well on his way to becoming the richest person on the planet, he sent up a SpaceX rocket. He put a Tesla Roadster inside, and inside that Roadster he’d put a digital copy of Asimov’s Foundation and displayed a DON’T PANIC sign on its dashboard. Having decided to go to Mars for the purpose of custom-made luxury planet-building, Musk, without irony, suggested he might name the first SpaceX ship to go to Mars the Heart of Gold, an homage to Beeblebrox.
Jeff Bezos, too, traced his Magrathean luxury-planet-building ambitions to his boyhood. Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964, the year NASA launched the Mariner 4 probe, the first spacecraft to fly by Mars.
The idea that Mars might be a place for humans to settle began to seriously emerge in the 1990s, when Bezos and Musk were starting to make millions, even billions, of dollars and wondering what to do with such unimaginable sums just as writers and scientists began to imagine ways Mars could be made habitable. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published the Mars trilogy—in which scientists from Earth have terraformed the planet to make it suitable for human settlement—and in 1996, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin published a coauthored book called The Case for Mars. “Exploring Mars requires no miraculous new technologies, no orbiting spaceports, no gigantic interplanetary space cruisers,” Zubrin wrote. “We can establish our first small outpost on Mars within a decade.”