On the set of Starship Troopers, 1977. (TriStar Pictures/Getty)
Earlier this month, President Trump posted an image apparently showing new uniforms for the US Space Force. The overtly fascist-villain-coded design was reportedly “inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform”. The 1997 sci-fi film Starship Troopers is, according to director Paul Verhoeven, “about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism” — and the costumes were modelled on Nazi imagery.
I believe that Trump’s US Space Force uniforms, alongside widespread talk on X and beyond of colonising Mars and other impossible celestial feats, constitute the final frontier of the “culture wars”. Over the past few years, I have watched a new strain of delusional xenophobia quietly brewing in science-fiction online subcultures, and then begin to percolate through political conversation. It has now borne its putrid fruit.
After gaining some fame as the author of “far-future evolutionary fiction”, you might think it strange that I do not share the current unbridled optimism about the so-called “enterprising spirit of humanity” conquering the galaxy. There are two main reasons for my sceptical attitude: one is merely practical, the other is ideological.
Let us first consider the practical unlikelihood of “colonising Mars”. The true believers on X speak of building cities on Mars or even terraforming the Red Planet — that is to say, using technology (somehow) to render it habitable to human beings. But in my opinion, the task is flat-out impossible. I wish this wasn’t the case, but when one considers the “when rubber hits the road” logistics of the whole deal, even supposedly basic terraforming is simply not feasible on Mars. Even if you somehow had the technology to find asteroids, crash them into Mars, wait for centuries for the resulting storm of debris and crashed ice to settle down, then spent some more time somehow brewing a breathable atmosphere out of the resulting murk — as die-hard advocates propose — the atmosphere of Mars is just too weak. Even if you pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, the oxygen would seep into space within a few centuries. You’d have to constantly import air just to keep the whole thing going. And it would take so long to import. The closest Mars gets to Earth is over 54 million kilometres away. In comparison the Moon is a little over 384,000 kilometres away.
Could it be that even Elon Musk, the greatest proponent of colonising Mars, has finally realised this? In 2017, he stated he felt “fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me… Then build up the base, starting with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, and even bigger. And yeah, over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.” As late as 2025 he was doubling down on his claims, stating that he was “going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” But earlier this year, he changed tack, announcing that “for those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years”. Yet even if Musk is beginning to face reality, many of his devotees on X still refuse to.
I’m not ruling out the possibility of temporary bases on the Moon or maybe even Mars, but big cities where humans live for generations are impossible for logistical reasons. There’s also the temporal and organisational angle, which is rarely considered in these fast, wet dreams of technological achievement. Even if terraforming was logistically viable, we are talking about centuries-long, very resource-intensive commitments here. Now, look at the current state of the world: as things stand, we lack the social organisation for cooperative endeavours that last more than a century. I don’t think even nation states can survive those chasms of time unscathed.
Some of the longest-enduring societies on Earth were primitive neolithic cities. Catalhoyuk in Anatolia lasted unchanged for 2,000 years, and matrilineal lines lived in the same place, sometimes for dozens of generations. This may show that enduring forms of social organisation are indeed possible, but the sheer atavistic conservatism that enabled this resilience is directly at odds with the “space frontier” mindset. This line of thinking could inspire weapons-grade science fiction, featuring culturally-stunted neolithic farmers working — or being orchestrated from behind the scenes by a caste of hidden elites? — to build towards an off-world colony. But this would have no relation whatsoever to reality.
Then there’s the question of money. Imagine, somehow, that such an effort gets underway. A company, or more likely, a nation, starts launching asteroid-catcher ships. They seek, locate, and wrangle an asteroid, and in eight decades, they finally bring it in — whether to crash it into Mars for a terraforming effort, or to mine it outright for resources. But by then, the company funding the effort might not exist anymore. The government backing it could be gone. The very timetables involved with planetary terraforming are diametrically opposed to the disruptive, extractive capitalists who usually go about spouting such schemes. How are you going to pay for your Mars base over a centuries-long timespan? With company shares? Government bonds?
But don’t worry, such a scheme wouldn’t work under communism either. Not even the hardcore Chinese or Soviet varieties. Nothing short of a knowing, targeted abnegation of reason — perhaps in the form of a brain-washing religious cult — could force human beings to commit to a singular, non-immediate-reward-offering cause for so long.
Yet even the madness of a Mars colony seems level-headed compared to the ludicrous and much-hyped notion of a space megastructure. Popularised initially by Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, and marinated in the minds of more recent generations by the Halo game franchise, the most popular space megastructure vision is a ring-world — a band of solid material extending like a ribbon as long as the orbit of a planet around a sun. Theoretically, such a structure could offer a habitable space up to a billion times the surface area of Earth. Make the ring into a solid shell, and you get what’s called a Dyson sphere. Or make a slightly smaller cylinder sealed at both ends, rotate it to get gravity via centrifugal force and you get an O’Neill cylinder. This latter concept was popularised by Arthur Clarke and Genty Lee’s Rama series, and is usually touted as a workable design for an interstellar spaceship. There are even wilder ideas out there — extend the cylinder into a vast hollow spaghetti strand and you get a topopolis. Wrap that spaghetti around star clusters and you get a galactic topopolis!
These concepts make for some incredible “playgrounds of the mind” — and stories written about them are some of the best in the genre. However, even if the energy sources and tools to make them were available (they aren’t, and will never be, but read on), the sheer tensile strengths needed to keep such structures intact would mean that the raw material of ring-worlds or O’Neill cylinders would need to be as strong as the force that binds atomic nuclei together. That is just another way of saying that it is physically impossible.
Faced with facts, the space fantasist’s usual retort is to blurt out that oft-prattled half-truth: “they thought powered flight was impossible, too!” If you spar with them online, this particular response is so predictable that it feels like the unthinking reflex of some distasteful frog, flashing aposematic colours to potential predators. You prod them just to see it. The truth of the matter is that powered flight was seen as a distinct possibility from 18th-century Montgolfier balloons onwards — perhaps even earlier since birds fly. The naysayers’ claims have reached us simply because they were preposterous, even in their time.
Techno optimists believe that “tech” will solve any problem if applied, or argued for, hard enough. To them, everything is an engineering problem, or else an attitude one. They are right that humanity accomplished a monumental spurt of technological growth during the 20th century — but believing that “technology” is some miracle panacea that will keep making everything better and faster is akin to believing that a fast-growing toddler will be taller than a house when he is 20 years old. Almost by its very nature, growth stops. Technological plateaus are very real, and from a vantage point of “making life multiplanetary” we will always be on one.
Nevertheless, there are still plenty of naive people who believe that space colonies and megastructures are not only feasible, but also inevitable. Any casual sweep on X reveals unintentionally hilarious, cock-sure examples. I can’t help but wonder whether people like “Lunar Citizen” or “Space Koala” honestly believe in the delusional bullshit they are spewing? Or is it simply “signal boosting” aimed at their peers? Perusing such drivel on X is a strictly “do-not-engage” affair. Few of these characters acknowledge the immensity of the technical challenges that accompany their ideas; point them out, and you are immediately attacked for “spoiling the vibes”, or “spreading pessimism”. For people steeped in the “engineering mindset”, they certainly do rely a lot on vibes.
A strange sentiment animates many true believers. It is ostensibly a “belief in the human spirit” — frequently expressed with the motto “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” — but in practice it is a barely-concealed desire to eliminate “undesirables” who do not share their lethal blend of techno-optimism. The Venn diagram intersection between the “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” crowd, who believe in “humanity’s galactic manifest destiny”, and outright fascists is more crowded than one first imagines.
Let us then dissect their ethos, pinned before us like a nauseating xenomorph with acid for blood. The “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” sentiment (abbreviated as HFY hereafter), in my opinion, is basically a memetic parasite — a mostly fan-made sub-genre attached to science fiction. There are three major components of it.
The first comes from a really weird sub-fandom that developed around a meme based on a villain from James Cameron’s Avatar movies. I’ll quickly summarise: the Avatar series revolves around the “noble savage” world called Pandora, inhabited by the blue-skinned Na’vi. If you live like them and respect nature, the world to you is paradise. Meanwhile, the colonising humans are portrayed as at best naïve and at worst evil. In the end, there is a war between mechanised humans and the Na’vi, and the humans are sent packing back to their dying planet Earth.
The character that appeals most to the HFY sentiment in the Avatar franchise is Colonel Miles Quaritch, a military officer tasked with wiping out the Na’vi resistance so humans can mine their precious floating metals (named “unobtanium” in reference to Fifties engineering slang); or in the second and third films, so that they can suck out the brains of alien whales for an immortality drug. All over X you can see memes depicting the “Quaritch monologue” — a long chunk of text, pasted over badass-looking pictures of Colonel Quaritch. It goes something like this:
“Where are your marvels of engineering, your voyages of discovery, your great insights into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, we built wonders, we made great journeys, we forged epics — you have not. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…”
This quote is not from the film, nor from any of the franchise’s tie-in comics or computer games. Instead, this re-framing of the Avatar story comes from a fan-made Reddit thread from 2014. In this interpretation, Quaritch isn’t a villain serving galactic imperialists — he’s fighting for civilisation and human supremacy. He sees the Na’vi not as noble savages, but as actual savages, and in these perverted fan edits, he is the franchise’s unsung hero.
The second component of the HFY spirit comes from the massive Warhammer 40,000 universe. Warhammer depicts a grim future where humanity is constantly at war with space orcs, space bugs, space demons, space pharaoh-zombies, and dozens of other factions. It is, essentially, dark satire. The Imperium of Man, the “pro-human” faction, is written almost like a list of everything not to do when running a society. It is an ultra-theocratic autocracy centered around the worship of an “Emperor of Mankind” kept in a vegetative state. A thousand people are sacrificed a day to keep him alive. The state religion considers associating with aliens to be a serious crime, to be punished with death. Space-age technology exists, but due to religious taboos forbidding innovation, little has been improved, and everything exists in a state of decay. This was a distinctly ironic, British, anti-theist, gallows-humour vision of the world. The earliest Warhammer art is literally indistinguishable from Viz-magazine style, post-punk protest art.
The HFY crowd doesn’t seem to get this. Its angle on Warhammer mostly thrives on fan edits — videos with impressive visuals of Space Marines marching while phonk music plays in the background. Usually, they come with cheesy, over-the-top messages — “Humanity first!”; “Suffer not the xenos to live!” etc. — completely missing the irony. They see the evils of the Imperium as necessary evils, and to them the “virtues” of this society — conformism, xenophobia, the violent will-to-power — are all lessons one can apply to real life. After all, they say, they are all for the advancement of the human species across the galaxy.
It goes without saying that one never meant to cheer for the Imperium of Man. You were supposed to laugh at it — a cynical laugh, sure, but a laugh nonetheless. You were meant to darkly enjoy its absurdity, its bleakness. But I don’t think you were ever meant to use it for political lessons.
The third part of the HFY chimera is based on Starship Troopers — and this brings us back to Trump’s US Space Force uniforms. Starship Troopers was originally a classic sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a dictatorship that takes over the world and then starts a galactic war against giant arachnid bugs. The book followed a man’s experiences in military service, and later on, his recollections of the war; but it was essentially the author’s commentary on the virtues of a meritocratic, militaristic society.
In 1997 the director Paul Verhoeven made a movie based on the book. But the film was a completely different artefact. Verhoeven didn’t want to adapt the book faithfully — he wanted to satirise it. The film became a cutting commentary on the nature of fascism. The characters start out as bright-eyed kids, but as the war progresses, they slowly morph into cartoonish and very clearly Nazi-coded villains. Any viewer worth his or her salt was meant to despair at how easily war reshapes society.
The film was completely misunderstood by the HFY crowd. To them, Starship Troopers was a call to arms. “Humanity is under threat! Crush the arachnids! Join the fight! Service guarantees citizenship!” The point Verhoeven was making about militarisation and fascism was lost on them. The epitome of this sentiment was the 2018 YouTube video, “The Politics of Starship Troopers”, by Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. This immensely popular video, which had over a million views at the time of writing, argues that Verhoeven “misunderstood” Heinlein’s book. Instead of being a caricature of fascism or Nazism, the militaristic, human-centric society portrayed in the book and the movie was “merely” a quasi-libertarian one where people deprived of “meaning” in a lax, amoral, liberal world could “join an institution and really earn their own citizenship… by going out and building the world that they want to see”. When applied to present-day affairs, it’s clear who the “humans” are, and who the “arachnids” would be in the minds of this video’s intended audience. It is, in fact, darkly revealing to notice how stories crafted as entertainment products are now forming the nuclei of political sentiment. It is almost as if social expression has no conventional outlet left.
The sort of people who take Warhammer’s Imperium seriously, who root for Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, who want to see the Mobile Infantry squash bugs in real life, are more often than not the same people who espouse unlimited confidence in colonising space and erecting megastructures all over the place. They possess the engineer’s fetish for applying unbridled power to solve perceived problems. Yet the trouble is, many of the problems we face today aren’t as straightforward as evil aliens in science-fiction memes. Some of our current troubles may simply be systemic, insurmountable however much power you use. Others, such as the looming threat of large-scale war or a climate-related emergency, may indeed require a level of restriction or hierarchy to solve — but going Space Marines on them will not be a wise approach. As the recent blunder in Iran has shown, these will be situations where cooler heads will need to prevail.
The truth is HFY is less a genre of science fiction than a memetic plague spreading through lower tiers of contemporary sci-fi fandom. It takes random bits from disparate works of military science fiction, strips away their complexity, and reduces their message to “strong-army-man shoots bug; humanity wins; civilisation restored — voila!” Every problem is an enemy, every enemy can be destroyed, and sufficient application of force will put everything right. It is reductionist, lacking curiosity and intellectual depth. It brims with a cruel dislike of outliers, or anything that is otherwise “different”. HFY leads to the most dumbed-down distillate of xenophobia one can cook up. Its proponents are spiritually impoverished louts, grasping science fiction from the wrong end. They confirm the quote that is often attributed to Einstein but actually comes from The Medusa and the Snail, the 1979 science book by Lewis Thomas: “Space is infinite. Man’s knowledge of space is finite. The sum of our understanding is not yet sufficient for us to comprehend how vast the dimensions of our ignorance [are].”
Although this group continues to grow, there are signs that it may, at least in part, one day be astroturfed. Google Trends data for “space elevators”, “Mars colonies”, “ring worlds”, and associated topics shows a sudden upsurge in popularity in the last two years. This may have been caused by the X algorithm pushing “space optimism”, which in turn might have been used to bolster the public appraisal of Musk’s SpaceX stock earlier this year. The company turned out to be grossly overvalued, and recently its stock prices tanked — liquifying the pipe dreams (and the hard-earned cash) of the space bro crowd. The best laid plans of mice and men… And yet for now, HFY continues to rule X.
One of the greatest, but sadly lesser-known speculative-evolution artists is Karl Kofoed. In a career spanning years, he built up a dazzling universe of illustrated ecosystems and inhabited worlds through Heavy Metal magazine’s regular “Galactic Geographic” feature, which was later adapted into book form as the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003: Earth Edition. The most advanced race in the Galactic Geographic universe is a species of God-like sophonts called the WO. These beings are powerful enough to forge matter into pure energy, and erect megastructures thousands of kilometres in dimension. The most remarkable aspect of the WO, however, is the fact that they never spread beyond their home world. This is a rare thing in science-fiction literature, where off-world colonies and space empires are a dime-a-dozen. By being good stewards of their home planet, the WO are able to extend the lifespan of their civilisation for hundreds of millions of years, and in doing so, advance considerably. Rather than being an obstacle to progress, their focus on their home planet was the key to their God-like power.
A pretty good lesson for all incorrigible expansionists, HFY rubes, and doe-eyed techno-fascists, don’t you think? The neat thing about science fiction literature is that it is vast — and within its gaudy halls there are as many (probably more) parables for integrity and hope than there are for the dumb, boyish lust for power.