Bradbury, Frontier Capital and the Business of the Permanent Future
Ray Bradbury’s “The Old Ones” lasts barely a page, yet it contains an entire theory of colonisation. By the time the elderly arrive on Mars, the heroic period is over. Explorers have explored, pioneers have pioneered, businessmen have followed them, intellectuals have turned the new world into material, tourists have begun consuming it, and finally come the people Bradbury describes with grotesque affection as the “dry and crackling people,” the “dried-apricot people,” the “mummy people.” They have previously gone to California in winter and Italy in spring. Now they go to Mars.
The joke is that Mars has become ordinary.
That is what makes the revised date printed above the story—August 2036—so striking when read in 2026. Bradbury’s chronology imagines that within ten years Mars will be sufficiently domesticated that elderly travellers can treat it as the latest destination in a lifetime of comfortable migration.
Nothing remotely like that is going to happen.
There may conceivably be machines on Mars in 2036 more sophisticated than those already there. There may even, although this remains profoundly uncertain, have been an initial human expedition. NASA continues to describe Mars as a long-term objective for human exploration and discusses human missions in the 2030s, but its own material presents these as difficult, multi-year expeditions requiring solutions for radiation, isolation, reduced gravity, closed life-support systems, food, water, power and medical autonomy. NASA describes a Mars mission as potentially taking astronauts away from Earth for roughly three years.
SpaceX uses much more expansive language. Its current Mars material speaks of a self-sufficient city requiring more than a million inhabitants, millions of tonnes of cargo and ultimately thousands of Starships. Yet the same page currently describes cargo flights to Mars as beginning “no earlier than 2028,” at an advertised rate of $100 million per metric tonne. The section discussing the first human explorers does not give a firm date.
Between these two statements lies the central problem of contemporary Mars colonisation.
The technology is discussed in the language of engineering.
The destination is discussed in the language of mythology.
And the money is raised in the space between them.
Bradbury imagined the social consequences of a successful colonisation programme. Our own culture has become increasingly adept at monetising the anticipation of one.
I. Bradbury’s Most Radical Idea: Mars Becomes Boring
Most science fiction writers make the alien world strange. Bradbury’s more interesting manoeuvre in The Martian Chronicles is gradually to make Mars familiar.
Once the initial terror and wonder have subsided, humans begin repeating themselves. They build towns. They import habits. They reproduce prejudices. They sell things. They rename places. They carry their nostalgia with them. Eventually they bring old age.
“The Old Ones” is therefore not primarily a story about elderly people. It is a story about the completion of colonisation.
A frontier populated exclusively by twenty-eight-year-old engineers, test pilots, prospectors and adventurers is not a civilisation. It is a work camp.
A settlement becomes a society only when it contains people who are economically unnecessary to the act of settlement: children, retirees, eccentrics, dependants, artists, invalids, tourists, idlers, widows, grandparents and people whose useful labour belongs largely to the past.
Bradbury understood this instinctively.
His old people do not arrive to operate nuclear reactors. They are not expected to repair pressure vessels, survey regolith or calculate orbital transfers. They come because people go places. Mars has become somewhere one can simply be.
That is an astonishingly high threshold.
It requires not merely a rocket capable of reaching Mars, but an infrastructure capable of making the journey routine enough that frail bodies can undertake it. It presupposes reliable transport, radiation protection, medical provision, accommodation, food production, emergency systems, energy generation, communications, governance and probably return transport. Above all, it presupposes surplus.
Bradbury’s elderly Martians are evidence that the frontier has accumulated enough surplus capacity to support the non-pioneer.
This is exactly the part of the Mars dream that contemporary promotional culture tends to skip.
We are shown the rocket.
Then we are shown the city.
Between them lies almost everything.
II. The Missing Middle
A reusable launch vehicle is an extraordinary machine. It is not a civilisation.
This distinction becomes blurred because technological narratives compress infrastructure into icons. The steam locomotive becomes the railway. The aeroplane becomes aviation. The rocket becomes the space programme. Starship therefore becomes, rhetorically, Mars.
But a transport system and a destination economy are radically different things.
Suppose a vehicle capable of carrying substantial cargo to Mars were perfected tomorrow. One of the largest technical obstacles would have been reduced. The fundamental settlement problem would remain.
Mars has no breathable atmosphere. Its atmosphere is overwhelmingly carbon dioxide. Surface pressure is far below Earth’s. Liquid water is not freely available in the manner required by terrestrial settlement. Temperatures are extreme. Dust creates engineering and health problems. Surface radiation is much greater than on Earth. Medical evacuation is impossible on ordinary timescales. Communication delays prevent real-time terrestrial control. Every life-support failure becomes potentially existential.
NASA therefore identifies five interacting classes of human-spaceflight hazard: radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, altered gravity and hostile closed environments. It explicitly notes that these hazards interact and can intensify one another.
A settlement consequently requires not one successful technology but a stack of technologies with exceptionally high reliability.
Air must work.
Water must work.
Power must work.
Waste recycling must work.
Food must work.
Thermal management must work.
Pressure vessels must work.
Computing must work.
Medical systems must work.
Agriculture must work.
Maintenance must work.
Manufacturing must work.
Logistics must work.
And because there is no nearby functioning economy from which replacements can conveniently be purchased, eventually the settlement must possess the industrial capacity to repair or reproduce much of the system on which it depends.
This is where the idea of a “self-sustaining” Martian city becomes much more demanding than the attractive renderings imply.
A city is not self-sustaining merely because it grows potatoes.
Modern civilisation rests upon absurdly deep supply chains: semiconductors, lubricants, bearings, pharmaceuticals, machine tools, polymers, alloys, sensors, optical components, electrical insulation, specialist chemicals, mining machinery, metrology equipment and thousands of categories of mundane component whose absence becomes visible only when one breaks.
The first Martian settlement, if it exists, is therefore likely to resemble an Antarctic research station crossed with a nuclear submarine and an offshore industrial platform rather than a Californian suburb beneath a transparent dome.
The retirees do not arrive after the rocket works.
They arrive after the civilisation works.
That could be generations later.
III. The Product Is the Future
This produces a peculiar economic problem.
Mars cannot presently generate ordinary consumer demand because there are no consumers there. It cannot produce substantial exports because transportation costs are enormous. It has no established internal economy. There is no Martian tax base, property market, labour market or customer population.
The immediate economic value of Mars therefore lies largely somewhere else.
It lies on Earth.
Mars attracts investment, careers, government contracts, engineering programmes, media attention, political prestige, technological research and corporate valuation on Earth long before anything resembling a Martian society exists.
This does not make those activities fraudulent. Quite the contrary: many produce genuine engineering.
SpaceX is the obvious example of why a careful distinction is necessary. Calling the company itself a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme would be inaccurate. It builds functioning launch vehicles, operates launches, supplies spacecraft, provides communications infrastructure and holds substantial contracts for real engineering deliverables. NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship-derived Human Landing System for Artemis, initially under a $2.89 billion milestone-based award, later adding a roughly $1.15 billion modification for further lunar capability.
There is hardware.
There are customers.
There are launches.
There is measurable engineering.
Yet Mars plays another role alongside all this.
Mars is the terminal promise.
It provides an almost infinitely expandable justification for everything below it.
A larger rocket is necessary because Mars.
Orbital refuelling is necessary because Mars.
Rapid reusability is necessary because Mars.
Higher launch cadence is necessary because Mars.
More capital is necessary because Mars.
More infrastructure is necessary because Mars.
And because the final objective lies so far beyond ordinary commercial accountability, almost any intermediate development can be described as progress towards it.
This creates what might be called a pyramid-shaped economy of expectation.
At the top sits the tiny, glittering proposition:
A civilisation on Mars.
Beneath it sits an expanding hierarchy of enabling propositions:
Starships.
Tankers.
Launch towers.
Satellite constellations.
Engine factories.
Landing systems.
Communications networks.
Government partnerships.
Research programmes.
Supplier ecosystems.
Investment rounds.
Recruitment.
Public enthusiasm.
The structure continuously widens as one descends toward the present.
The Martian city remains at the apex, almost untouched.
The capital flows at the bottom.
IV. The Permanent Future
This model possesses one particularly useful property: the most important promise can remain perpetually ahead of the organisation making it.
This is the permanent future.
The permanent future is close enough to influence behaviour but distant enough to escape verification.
Five years is ideal.
Ten years is excellent.
Twenty years permits almost anything.
The deadline moves while the narrative remains intact.
This is not unique to spaceflight. Technological capitalism repeatedly produces objects of deferred completion: general artificial intelligence, commercial fusion, radical life extension, fully autonomous transport, asteroid mining, universal household robotics. Each may eventually produce important technologies. Some may ultimately achieve their stated objective.
The sociologically interesting feature is that the future achievement begins generating present value before it exists.
People invest not simply in what has been built but in what the organisation is believed to be approaching.
Employees accept extraordinary workloads because they are participating in history.
Governments subsidise capability because they fear strategic dependence.
Journalists reproduce extraordinary projections because extraordinary projections make stories.
Fans defend delays because criticism threatens not merely a company but an imagined future.
Investors tolerate expenditure because the prospective market is planetary.
The vision becomes collateral.
Mars is exceptionally powerful collateral because it cannot easily be exhausted.
If a company claims it will manufacture ten thousand cars next year, the claim can be checked next year.
If it claims to be constructing the foundations of a million-person Martian civilisation, almost any piece of aerospace development can be fitted somewhere into a hundred-year roadmap.
The destination recedes elegantly as the traveller advances.
V. Mars One: When the Metaphor Became Almost Literal
There has already been a particularly revealing experiment in monetising Mars before possessing any serious capacity to reach it.
Mars One proposed establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars through one-way missions. It generated enormous publicity and attracted more than 200,000 applications during its early selection process. The scheme proposed funding itself partly through the media value of astronaut selection and the eventual mission. Its commercial arm controlled monetisation rights involving broadcasting, merchandise and intellectual property. After repeated delays, Mars One Ventures entered bankruptcy proceedings in 2019.
Mars One is useful because it stripped the structure almost naked.
The compelling product was not transportation.
It was participation in the story of transportation.
Applicants could imagine themselves as settlers.
Audiences could imagine watching them.
Sponsors could imagine association with them.
Investors could imagine the global media market produced by them.
The settlement itself existed principally in the future tense.
Mars One demonstrated something important about the economics of impossible destinations: one does not necessarily have to reach the destination in order to commercialise the desire to reach it.
Mars can be monetised as narrative property.
The voyage becomes entertainment before it becomes transportation.
The colonist becomes a character before becoming an astronaut.
The future becomes an intellectual-property portfolio.
This is why the language of “grift” becomes tempting.
But again precision matters. A failed speculative venture is not automatically fraud. An ambitious technical programme is not fraudulent merely because its schedule proves unrealistic. Human beings undertake projects without knowing whether they will succeed.
The more interesting criticism is structural rather than criminal.
A system can reward exaggerated promises without requiring anyone consciously to formulate a conspiracy.
If capital preferentially flows toward the largest story, organisations learn to tell larger stories.
If spectacular deadlines generate attention, deadlines become spectacular.
If investors reward total-addressable markets measured in planets, corporate rhetoric discovers planets.
The exaggeration can emerge naturally from the incentive structure.
Nobody has to gather in a dark room and decide to invent the future.
The market selects for people who already believe it.
VI. The Frontier as Financial Technology
There is another reason Mars is unusually effective as an investment narrative.
Western culture already knows how to understand a frontier.
The frontier possesses a familiar grammar:
empty land;
brave pioneers;
hostile environment;
individual freedom;
abundant resources;
technological conquest;
settlement;
property;
wealth.
This vocabulary does considerable ideological work.
A frontier appears to contain value that merely waits to be unlocked. Investment therefore becomes not expenditure but early participation in inevitable expansion.
The analogy with the American frontier is especially persistent, even though Mars is radically less hospitable than any terrestrial wilderness ever settled by humans.
Every human migration on Earth occurred within an operating biosphere.
The most hostile desert still contained breathable atmospheric pressure.
The Arctic contained oxygen.
The oceans contained oxygen above their surface.
The Antarctic provided water and an atmosphere.
Even the remotest historical settler possessed a planet beneath him already performing nearly all of the fundamental chemical work required to keep a human alive.
Mars does not.
Calling Mars a frontier therefore smuggles an enormous technological assumption into an innocent geographical metaphor.
It makes Mars sound distant rather than lethal.
It makes settlement appear hard rather than biologically artificial.
It replaces the phrase “construct and indefinitely maintain a sealed technological ecosystem on another planet” with the much more emotionally agreeable word “colonise.”
The frontier metaphor is itself a financing technology.
VII. The Billionaire’s Escape Hatch
Mars colonisation also interacts with a particularly contemporary fantasy: the belief that sufficiently wealthy or technologically competent people can exit collective problems.
Climate instability?
Mars.
Nuclear war?
Mars.
Pandemic?
Mars.
Asteroid impact?
Mars.
Civilisational stagnation?
Mars.
The argument is frequently framed as redundancy. Humanity should become multiplanetary so that a catastrophe on one planet cannot extinguish the species.
As an extremely long-term proposition, this is not irrational. A genuinely independent civilisation beyond Earth would indeed reduce some classes of existential risk.
The sleight of hand occurs when an extraordinarily distant resilience strategy is rhetorically substituted for much more immediate terrestrial resilience.
A Mars settlement capable of surviving the destruction of industrial civilisation on Earth would need to be genuinely autonomous. It could not merely contain humans. It would need the scientific, industrial, genetic, agricultural, medical and cultural capacity to perpetuate a civilisation without terrestrial resupply.
That is a dramatically more difficult requirement than planting a flag or maintaining a research base.
A settlement dependent upon regular shipments from Earth is not a backup for Earth.
It is an unusually vulnerable dependency of Earth.
The irony is considerable.
We imagine Mars as insurance against systemic failure while proposing to build a society whose first generations would be dependent upon the most elaborate supply chain in human history.
VIII. Why the Old Ones Will Not Go
And so we return to Bradbury.
His elderly migrants expose the difference between a mission and a civilisation.
The old ones will not go to Mars because everything about the initial era of human Mars travel selects against them.
Early crews will almost certainly be selected for health, technical capability, psychological resilience and operational usefulness. NASA’s own human-research framework emphasises the physical and psychological hazards of long-duration missions, altered gravity, radiation, isolation and the difficulty of receiving medical support at interplanetary distances.
The first human beings on Mars, if they arrive, will not be tourists.
They will be payload.
Every kilogram associated with them will have logistical consequences. Every illness will be an operational problem. Every individual will occupy habitat volume, consume oxygen and water, require food and contribute to heat and waste loads.
A retired couple deciding in November that the Martian winter might be good for Arthur’s chest is not merely unlikely.
It represents the end-state of an industrial transformation we have barely begun.
For Bradbury’s old people to arrive, Mars travel would need to undergo something analogous to the transformation of transatlantic travel from heroic expedition to scheduled airline service.
The vehicles would need predictable reliability.
The destination would need hospitals.
There would need to be spare accommodation.
There would need to be ordinary employment.
There would need to be shops.
There would need to be people whose presence had no mission justification whatsoever.
Mars would need to stop being a project.
It would need to become a place.
Nothing in the present architecture suggests that transition is remotely close.
IX. What May Actually Be Built
This does not imply that Mars exploration is pointless.
Quite the opposite.
Robotic exploration of Mars has produced extraordinary science. Human exploration could produce more. Technologies developed for extreme autonomy, recycling, energy systems, medicine, robotics and closed-loop habitats may have valuable terrestrial applications. Launch systems developed under grandiose interplanetary ambitions can transform near-Earth transport.
Indeed, this may be one of the central paradoxes of the Mars dream:
the promise can be exaggerated while the intermediate technologies remain enormously valuable.
A civilisation on Mars may prove economically absurd while the rocket supposedly designed to create it revolutionises orbital logistics.
A million-person colony may never exist while propulsion, robotics and communications systems developed in its name become routine.
The mythology can fail literally and succeed technologically.
This complicates the accusation of grift.
The nineteenth-century railway promoter might wildly exaggerate the metropolis that would eventually grow around a proposed station and nevertheless build a useful railway.
The speculative dream can subsidise genuine infrastructure.
The danger appears when society loses the ability to distinguish infrastructure from prophecy.
A successful launch is evidence that a launch vehicle works.
It is not evidence that a million people can live independently on Mars.
A successful orbital refuelling experiment would demonstrate orbital refuelling.
It would not demonstrate Martian agriculture.
A lunar Starship would demonstrate extraordinary capability.
It would not prove the economics of interplanetary settlement.
The steps are real.
The inference is optional.
X. Bradbury’s Error Was More Interesting Than Our Prediction
Bradbury was almost certainly wrong about the timescale.
That hardly matters.
Science fiction is rarely most valuable when it successfully predicts an engineering timetable.
Bradbury was interested in what happens after the impossible becomes ordinary.
Our peculiar historical position is almost the reverse.
We live in a civilisation extraordinarily skilled at making the impossible appear ordinary before it exists.
We can watch computer-generated Starships descending beside illuminated Martian cities.
We can inspect concept art of settlers walking through pressurised habitats.
We can read projected cargo capacities, settlement populations and launch cadences.
We can consume the mature civilisation aesthetically without building it materially.
Bradbury imagined elderly people consuming Mars.
We consume images of elderly people eventually consuming Mars.
That difference is everything.
The modern Martian colony already has inhabitants.
They live in presentations.
They walk through architectural renderings.
They populate corporate videos.
They stand against enormous windows looking across the red desert.
They are healthy.
The plants are green.
The pressure seals never fail.
Nobody appears to manufacture replacement bearings.
Nobody develops appendicitis.
Nobody asks who owns the oxygen plant.
Nobody explains the debt structure.
Nobody goes on strike.
Nobody grows old.
They are not settlers.
They are financial illustrations.
XI. The Pyramid
The Mars project can therefore be drawn as a pyramid, although not necessarily a fraudulent one.
At its apex is the smallest and most emotionally powerful object:
Mars.
Immediately beneath it:
the self-sustaining city.
Then:
human missions.
Then:
cargo missions.
Then:
interplanetary spacecraft.
Then:
orbital refuelling and reusable heavy launch.
Then:
launch infrastructure, satellites, communications, lunar contracts, military contracts, research programmes and terrestrial businesses.
Then, at the broad base:
investors, taxpayers, workers, customers, enthusiasts and political constituencies.
The remarkable feature is that the economic traffic runs mostly upward in expectation and downward in justification.
Money collected at the terrestrial base supports engineering higher in the structure.
The Martian apex legitimises the scale of the base.
Mars does not need to generate revenue.
Mars generates meaning.
And meaning, under the correct financial conditions, generates capital.
That is the grift-like characteristic worth examining.
The proposition need never be stated crudely as “give us money and we will sell you a house on Mars.”
It is subtler:
Give us money because we are the organisation building the future.
Award us contracts because our technology leads toward the future.
Value us highly because we will dominate the infrastructure of the future.
Work here because you will help create the future.
Accept risk because history rewards those who arrive early in the future.
The future becomes simultaneously destination, justification and asset.
XII. August 2036
Which brings us back to the date printed on Bradbury’s page.
August 2036.
Ten years away.
Imagine opening the book then.
Perhaps another rover will be crossing Mars.
Perhaps samples will have been returned.
Perhaps Starship or its descendants will be operating routinely in Earth orbit.
Perhaps humans will be preparing for Mars.
Perhaps, under an exceptionally aggressive programme, someone will already have gone.
But Bradbury’s “mummy people” will not be queueing at a departure terminal with heart medicine packed beside their holiday clothes.
There will be no Martian Riviera.
There will be no retirement brochures.
There will be no third-class passage.
There may not even be first class.
And this makes “The Old Ones” unexpectedly poignant.
Bradbury believed that the extraordinary technological problem would eventually disappear beneath ordinary human behaviour. We now inhabit a culture in which the extraordinary technological problem remains unresolved while the ordinary machinery of speculation, promotion, investment and branding has arrived decades ahead of it.
We have commercialised Mars before colonising it.
Perhaps that was inevitable.
The first substantial resource extracted from Mars was never iron, water or methane.
It was imagination.
And imagination has the considerable commercial advantage that it can be mined without leaving Earth.
The old ones will never go to Mars—not these old ones, perhaps not their children, and possibly not their grandchildren. Their role in the contemporary Mars economy is different from the one Bradbury imagined.
They will invest in it.
Vote for it.
Read about it.
Watch launches undertaken in its name.
Buy services from companies whose corporate mythology points toward it.
See its landscapes reproduced on screens.
Hear repeatedly that humanity stands at the threshold.
They may spend their entire lives standing at that threshold.
And when they are gone, another generation can be told that the door is about to open.
That may prove to be the defining difference between Bradbury’s Mars and ours.
Bradbury imagined the frontier eventually becoming a civilisation.
We may instead have invented something more characteristic of the twenty-first century:
a frontier whose most profitable condition is always to remain just over the horizon.