The world’s powers have to be ready for anything. After all, war could break out at any moment, and they have to be ready to fight. It’s very likely that every country in the world has plans ready to invade each and every one of their neighbors, just in case.

But some of those plans aren’t the best-kept secrets. Some of our plots to crush each other have been leaked—and now we know exactly what would happen if, for example, the US and Canada went to war. These plans might seem crazy today, but if things had just gone a little bit differently, any one of them could have been a part of history.

10 War Plan Red: The American Plan To Invade Canada

There was a time when the United States wasn’t totally sure what side it would take in World War II. They were still considering the possibility of taking the opportunity to declare war on Great Britain—and it was going to start with an invasion of Canada.^[1]

If Great Britain attacked the US, they figured, they would position their troops in Canada. The Americans didn’t want to let that happen, so they were going make a preemptive strike. They would attack Canada first.

Their goal was to take Halifax so that the British couldn’t use it as a port. To make it fast, they would bomb the city with poisonous gas. Then they’d move to Niagara Falls and take over the power plants there.

From there, it would be a full-on invasion, with American troops charging through Quebec and Winnipeg and capturing the nickel mines in Western Ontario. Meanwhile, the Navy would move south and take Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. Once they had British America, they figured, Great Britain would plead for peace.

Their only worry was that Canada might declare itself neutral and refuse to fight, in which case they planned on not letting them stay peaceful. If the Canadians tried to be pacifists, they would have to give up their ports and some of their land. Otherwise, the US Army would march in.

9 Defense Scheme Number One: The Canadian Plan To Invade the US

It’s a bit crazy that the US had a plan to invade Canada, but it gets weirder. Because Canada had a secret plan to invade the US—and they developed theirs first.

As early as 1921, Canada was already worrying that the Americans might attack. They were ready to strike back, and just like the Americans, they planned on doing so with a preemptive strike. They even sent an officer to travel through the US looking for weak spots they could attack.

Canada didn’t actually expect to conquer the United States. They just wanted to keep the Americans busy long enough for Great Britain to intervene. Their plan was to send troops down the West Coast while a team of Quebec fighters took Albany, and Maritime troops took Maine.

They’d catch the US off guard and then, when the Americans recouped, flee back over the border, leaving scorched earth in their wake. Every bridge, railway, factory, and farm would be burned to a crisp, crippling the US and buying enough time for their allies to move in.

If it happened, the Canadians figured, they’d have a lot of allies. Japan, France, and Mexico would join in and help them destroy the United States—because every one of them, they believed, had had enough of “the modern Yank.”^[2]

8 Operation Dropshot: The American Plan To Nuke The Soviet Union

If history had just gone a little bit differently, the Cold War wouldn’t have been cold at all. It would have been an all-out nuclear apocalypse that would have wiped Russia off the map.

Early on, the US was the only country with access to nuclear weapons, and they had every plan to use them. They developed at least nine separate plans to blow the USSR to Hell and back. One of the most intense ones called for a sudden strike of 300 nuclear bombs on 200 targets in the USSR, followed by a massive land invasion that they expected would be over in no time.^[3]

The US government had even marked the date on their calendar. On January 1, 1957, they were going to unleash their nuclear arsenal on the Soviets.

They only dropped the plan when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. If it hadn’t been for that, the US would have gone through with it and left Russia a smoldering, radioactive wasteland.

7 Seven Days To The River Rhine: The Soviet Plan To Nuke Half Of Europe

The Soviets had their own plans, of course. They probably had more schemes than we’ll ever know, but one that was written up in 1979 has been leaked—and if they’d gone through with it, it would have sparked World War III.

The plan was based on the idea that NATO was going to launch a nuclear first strike on Poland, which is such a strange notion that some people think it was just penciled in to make the rest of the plot seem more justifiable. Either way, the USSR planned to hit NATO hard.

They were going to launch 7.5 megatons’ worth of atomic weapons at targets in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.^[4] Then they would send in the troops to seize every part of Europe up to the River Rhine.

They expected some casualties. Prague and Warsaw, they believed, would be destroyed by nuclear strikes, and they were planning on sending the Polish army on a suicide mission. Within seven days, they predicted, more than two million Polish people would die—and a new world war would begin.

6 The Nazi Plan To Invade Japan

The Nazis never believed that their alliance with Japan would last. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, and when the war ended, things would change. “Sooner or later,” Hitler warned his staff, “there will have to be a showdown between the white and the yellow races.”

He believed it wouldn’t happen until the distant future, predicting that there might be 100 years of peace before Japan and the Nazis clashed. Still, they needed to be ready for it.

Himmler was tasked with getting the SS ready to fight. His biggest worry was that the Germans would grow complacent and weak during peace. He planned on keeping his soldiers tough by having them carry on with merciless racial eradication and, when they seemed to be getting weak, posting them to “an ice-cold winter” in Siberia.

The key, though, would be to have a population that could handle it. He would spend the next decade getting the German people to breed like “a botanical garden” to get their population as big as they could.^[5] When the time came, he predicted, Japan would have an army of more than one billion men. Germany would have to be ready to match their numbers.

5 National Redoubt: The Swiss Plan To Stop Being Neutral

The Swiss weren’t totally locked into being peaceful. They flirted with the idea of jumping into the war, and in 1940, they nearly did it.

By then, Switzerland was completely surrounded by Axis armies and had to seriously consider the possibility that this whole “let’s leave Switzerland alone” thing might not last. They were pretty sure the Axis could turn on them at any moment, so they started getting ready.

The Swiss withdrew all of their troops from the borders and moved them into the Alps, where they set up a chain of mountain fortresses and bunkers to prepare for an invasion.^[6] They also ran drills, reenacting the battles that were happening in the countries next door. And they did everything in their power to let the Axis see them doing it, hoping they’d get the message that if they messed with Switzerland, it wouldn’t be easy.

It wasn’t exactly paranoia. The Nazis had a secret plan of their own called Operation Tannenbaum, and it was exactly what the Swiss had predicted. Switzerland, Hitler believed, was a “pimple on the face of Europe.” If the tides of war hadn’t turned against the Axis, the Nazis would have charged right into Switzerland—and the armies in those Alps would have had to put their practice to the test.

4 The Turkish Plan To Invade Syria

Most of the plans in this list are decades old, but that doesn’t mean countries have stopped coming up with ways to invade each other. They just try to keep the new ones secret. Sometimes, though, those secrets leak—like in 2014, when Turkey’s conspiracy to invade Syria was leaked onto YouTube.

In the recording, Turkish ministers can be heard talking about a possible terrorist attack on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the father of the founder of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than being worried about it, one of the ministers says that a terrorist attack “must be seen as an opportunity for us.” If the terrorists attacked, they felt, they would have an excuse to send more soldiers into Syria and launch an all-out war.

Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan took it even further. If the terrorists didn’t attack, he promised, he’d just send in actors to fake an attack. “I’ll send four men from Syria, if that’s what it takes,” Fidan promised.^[7] “Legitimacy is not a problem. Legitimacy can be manufactured.”

3 The Israeli Plan To Invade Iran

From 2010 to 2012, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak met on at least three separate occasions to discuss plans to invade Iran. And they would’ve gone through with it, too, if Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces, hadn’t stopped them.

Three recordings that show Netanyahu and Barak discussing their plans were leaked onto the Internet. They came the closest to going through with it in 2010 but just needed to convince their ministers to support the plan.^[8] Ashkenazi, however, managed to talk them out of it with an impassioned speech about the lives that would be lost.

That didn’t totally stop them, though. In 2012, they ramped up plans again—and this time, it seems that the US Army was going to back them up. They were even running military drills to get ready for a joint invasion of Iran, although, for reasons unknown, they ended up calling the attack off.

2 Project A119: The American Plan To Nuke The Moon

In 1959, the US Army decided that just invading countries on Earth wasn’t ambitious enough. They were going to take it one step further. They were going to nuke the Moon.^[9]

The plan was partly to conduct a science experiment—which, as far as we can tell, must have been on the effects of overfunding a bored military—but they mostly just wanted to freak the Soviets out. They had scientists crunch the numbers to figure out how to make sure the explosion was visible from Earth, convinced that the USSR would crumble in fear if America blew a chunk out of the Moon.

The US didn’t go through with it because someone managed to convince the military that nuking the Moon wasn’t good PR. They came shockingly close to doing it, though. In fact, they even hired Carl Sagan to work on the secret plot to attack the Moon. And if they’d done it, they would’ve nuked the Moon before ever landing on it.

1 War Plan White: The American Plan To Fight Its Own People

During the first half of the 20th century, the United States made plans to invade pretty well every country on Earth—including themselves. It was called War Plan White, and it was the American plan to handle “internal disorder”—or, in other words, to fight its own people.

At the time, union workers around the country were fighting for labor rights, and the US government was worried it was going to build up into a communist revolution. War Plan White was their plan to deal with what they called a “leftist-radical insurrection.”^[10]

The Military Corps of Engineers were to take over every public utility, while the Navy protected military equipment and the Army marched through the people, trying to keep them in order. Meanwhile, a secret police force was going to be set up in Pennsylvania, which would spy on troublemakers to make sure they ready to stop them.

They’d even started working out the legalities of shooting American civilians, when it would be justifiable, and how far they could go. And as time went on, they reworked it for a new era. The most recent plan that has been leaked was for the US military to fight an uprising of black people wanting civil rights.

Billionaires pride themselves on their bold new ideas, which is probably why people accept them. In the areas that actually matter, however, ideas have been scarce for a long time. Mostly, billionaires are self-serving children with the power to follow their dreams — however ludicrous. Here are ten of the stupidest plans the super-rich are pursuing right now.

10. Munger Hall

In 2016, living dead billionaire Charles Munger made headlines for designing a student “mega-dorm” that architects have described as an experiment in human torture, and “a jail masquerading as a dormitory”. The 11-story building, proposed for UC Santa Barbara and nicknamed “Dormzilla”, is meant to house an incredible 4,500 students. But Munger, who proudly claimed never to have read a single book on architecture, included very few windows. Bedrooms might as well be underground; instead of windows, they have artificial sunlight from screens.

He told reporters that his design was cutting-edge, but one architect who resigned in protest from the college’s design review committee called it “unsupportable” from the perspective of “a parent and a human being”. It is, he said, a “social and psychological experiment.” Munger doesn’t deny it. In fact, he said the bedrooms aren’t meant to be comfortable; they’re meant to encourage students to spend more time together in the common areas. So it’s hardly pandemic-proof either. If Munger Hall were a city, it would be one of the most densely populated in the world — just behind Dhaka in Bangladesh. Per square mile, it would have 221,000 people.

What makes the billionaire’s plan even more sadistic is he bribed the college to accept it, offering a $200 million endowment on the condition that they build Munger Hall. Approached for comment, the university said they were “delighted” with the building — as if with a gun to their head and totally ignoring reports from inhabitants of a similar dormitory also designed by Munger and opened at the University of Michigan in 2015. “It was terrible,” one said, “The lack of windows was depressing … [there is] “no sense of time if you’re just in your room with no natural light.” Also mentioned were the damp, moldy bathrooms.

9. Seasteading

Years before he funded Donald Trump’s run for office, Peter Thiel — whose concept of libertarianism apparently puts a despot in charge — invested his money in seasteading, a deceptively quaint-sounding term for manmade tax havens at sea. In 2008, he put up $1.7 million in seed capital for the Seasteading Institute, a board of billionaire fantasists frustrated by taxes. It took him almost a decade to realize his folly. In 2017 he told the New York Times (who, like the rest of us, presumably already knew) that we don’t have the means to build cities at sea, hundreds of miles from shore — at least not without spending all his riches. 

But the Institute continues without him. Instead of bankrupting themselves to evade all human governments, they’ll erect their monstrous, platform-based Waterworld cities in French Polynesia instead. Of course, this means they’ll have to submit to its laws whether they like it or not. But laws affecting business and trade (i.e. taxes) they’ll be exempt from, having pressured the government to create a special economic zone just for them.

It’s still a long way off, though. For now, the billionaires remain landlocked  while they figure out how to build an island that won’t dissolve within decades. Apparently seawater poses a problem.

8. xAI

In July 2023, Elon Musk announced on Twitter the formation of his new company, xAI, saying the purpose was “to understand reality.” Apparently, like most billionaires and transhumanists, Musk needs all the help he can get. Researchers recruited to the endeavor were drawn from other top companies in the AI field, such as DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI. 

Co-founder Greg Yang, whose past employers include Apple, Google, and Microsoft, hopes xAI will take artificial intelligence “to the next level” by “developing the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks”. Beyond that, details are scarce. According to the website, “the goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” which Musk later phrased as “what the hell is really going on.” But there’s no explanation as to why he thinks computers can tell him. As Douglas Adams realized decades ago, we’re unlikely to understand the answer so it may as well just be 42.

Investors in his other company, Tesla, apparently want as little to do with xAI as possible. Musk made a point of saying that while xAI plans to use Tesla’s silicon computer chips, and possibly some software, “any relationship with Tesla has to be an arms-length transaction because Tesla [has] … a different investor base.” That’s corporate talk for “even my investors think this is stupid.”

7. Stealing Patagonia

British billionaire Joe Lewis made his fortune speculating against the British pound and Mexican peso. In the nineties, he used it to buy up more than 10,000 hectares of Patagonia, including Lake Escondido, which, breaking Argentinian law stating all bodies of water are public, he still keeps off-limits to Argentinians. 

So far, the government has failed to liquidate his locally registered shell company, Hidden Lake SA, which he set up solely to get around the law banning foreigners from buying certain land. It offers no goods or services whatsoever. Meanwhile, Lewis’s armed thugs continue to block Argentinians’ access to the lake — effectively enforcing the borders of Lewis’s “parallel state”. He’s also bribed officials and the press to keep his paradise private.

Needless to say, what makes the plan stupid is Lewis’s belief — typical of billionaires — that legal loopholes and paid-for politicians can protect him from ordinary Argentinians. They regularly march onto his land, often provoking violent confrontation, so it’s a battleground waiting to happen. The almost-90-year-old also naively failed to cover his back against countries he’s screwed in the past. At the time of writing, he faces jail in New York for insider trading and, pending sentencing, is not allowed to travel abroad.

6. Titanic II

Australia’s Donald Trump, the shamelessly self-promoting real estate and mining billionaire Clive Palmer, is an oddity among his class. Instead of fixating on our techno-industrial future, he’s far more fixated on the past. In recent years, he’s resurrected dinosaurs (in the world’s largest animatronic dino safari park, which burned down in 2015); thought about bringing back commercial airship flights (like the Hindenburg); and planned to build a life-size replica of the Titanic. His company, Blue Star Line, plans to make only one minor change to the original: adding a few meters width for “additional stability”. But otherwise the ship will be the same. Titanic II will be exactly as long as the original; it’ll have the same three passenger classes, restaurants, facilities, and decor; and it will stop at all the same ports. It might even hit the same iceberg.

Of course, Palmer isn’t the first to think up this plan. It’s already been shelved many times — not least because an exact replica of the Edwardian ocean liner wouldn’t pass modern regulations. The ship’s interior would need a redesign for safety (new stairways, doors, cabin arrangements, etc.), and it would be irresponsible not to use modern shipping technologies. Obviously coal power would be an issue. 

Basically, it couldn’t be the same ship — so why bother at all? Even an exact replica would lack the original spirit. Despite its name, Titanic II (or Gigantic as an earlier plan called it), would be dwarfed by modern equivalents — it’s not the biggest ship ever built any more. Neither is crossing the Atlantic the adventure that it was before air travel. As one critic points out, “to be the latest in transportation, a new ship would need to be a rocket.”

5. The Line

Since it was announced in 2021, Neom, the “Saudi Arabian City of the Future” has drawn criticism from experts worldwide — especially for the so-called Line at its core. Calling to mind other megastructure vanity projects, like Tokyo’s proposed Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, the Line remains laughably impractical — if not impossible. 

Although the psychopathic, narcissistic crown prince bin Salman is proud of his involvement in the project, it was actually his contribution that made it so unworkable. Namely, he took someone else’s idea of a city in a strip 2,000 meters wide and narrowed it down to 200 — so you can “feel it”, he said. And feel it people would. One of the main criticisms leveled at the Line is its basic unliveability.

But construction on The Line is under way regardless. As of last year, there’s a 200-meter-wide trench slicing through the pristine northwest of the otherwise oil-ravaged nation. Apparently liveability isn’t a concern; before commencing work at the site, the prince’s thugs evicted the locals and sentenced them to death.

4. Asgardia

In 2022 Azerbaijani billionaire Igor Ashurbeyli was re-elected Head of Asgardia, the “world’s first space nation”. His inauguration, which took place in a virtual rendering of Asgardia’s National Ark, was live streamed on his website for Asgardians worldwide. For now, the space nation remains here on Earth. In other words, it doesn’t exist. All it has in space is a Rubik’s cube sized mini-satellite in Low Earth Orbit. However, the dream is to build the Ark, get it in orbit, and facilitate the first childbirth in space. This is the mission for now. Later, Igor and his fellow Asgardians (who number more than a million) hope to grant citizenship and space-residency to 2% of Earth’s population and become one of its twelve strongest economies.

You may not have heard of it, but Asgardia was founded in 2016 and has some pretty serious people on board — including renowned Hong Kong space law professor Yun Zhao (Asgardia’s Supreme Justice), British Member of Parliament Lembit Öpik (Asgardia’s Chairman of Parliament), and European Space Agency veteran Lena de Winne (Asgardia’s Prime Minister). 

Unfortunately, despite its utopian vision, Asgardia’s Constitution reads more like a blueprint for dystopia. Even the freedom of speech is strictly conditional on upholding “Supreme Values”, national security, keeping secrets, and individuals’ “honour”. The scientocracy, which frowns on all “unenlightened” thinking, plans to regulate the flow of information, conduct parliamentary sessions in secret from citizens, and give sweeping despotic powers to Ashurbeyli himself. If that floats your boat (or Ark), it is, unsurprisingly, easy to hop aboard by registering your interest online.

3. The Metaverse

Although it’s still not clear what the plan is, Mark Zuckerberg’s not done with the Metaverse. Despite claims of its abandonment, his specially renamed umbrella company, Meta, continues to work on the frustratingly vague idea. Even employees are sick of Zuckerberg’s airy-fairy, whim-driven approach. As Wired observed in 2023, substituting the word ‘metaverse’ for ‘cyberspace’ in literally anything he says about his “plan” makes no difference to the meaning whatsoever. Because there isn’t much meaning to begin with. 

In essence, the Metaverse is a virtual reality hellscape through which Zuckerberg hopes to extract even more of your data and money. Like the internet, it would be accessed through a range of devices. And, also like the internet (at its worst, at least), it’ll track you from one to the other. This is really the point. It’s a Facebookification of the internet. No more hiding — not if this kind of thing appeals to you, anyway.

Of course, that’s a fairly bog standard blueprint for any tech startup. So what does Meta’s Metaverse actually offer? Is it, as Zuckerberg’s video ads imply, the ability to visit your friends in the real world as a hologram? No, because the technology doesn’t exist. Is it, as he originally promised, the ability “to do almost anything you can imagine”? Nope, unless all you can imagine doing is virtual, with screens strapped to your eyes. So is it basically Second Life? Pretty much! Just with extra bullying, if Facebook and Meta’s flagship VR platform Horizon are anything to go by, which of course they are. As it stands, though, all the Metaverse really is is a placeholder for an actual idea.

2. Calico Labs

Billionaires are well into life extension, but this is nothing new. What is new is their confidence in solving the “problem” of death (just like they solved the “problem” of taxes) within their own dwindling lifetimes. Announced in 2013, Larry Page’s Calico Labs, founded with money from Google, is the top company seeking a “cure”. The idea, Page said at the time of its launch, is “not just to make the world a little better, but a lot better.”

What’s questionable is whether extending the lifespan of the world’s most dangrous species would make the world better at all. There are many problems with life extension — ethical, ecological, social, economic, and so on. The most obvious is access; Larry Page and others already behave like modern-day pharaohs or living gods, enslaving the planet to bolster their power. How much further removed from the average human would they be if they were immortal? And how likely would they be to share that immortality given their hoarding of wealth? Even assuming they were philanthropic, is immortality something you’d want? Wouldn’t it be like staying awake without ever going to sleep (or staying asleep without ever waking up)?

Really, though, whether it’s for the few or for the many, human immortality would mean total control by the state. At the very least, reproduction would no longer be free. Other basic freedoms, such as thought (Minority Report style), would also be surveilled and restricted. Why? Because an immortal Larry Page and his fellow death-fearing technocrats would become so paranoid about preserving their thousand-plus-year life spans from accidental (or deliberate) termination, that every possible risk, including you, would have to be counted, vetted, and strictly surveilled.

1. The 2045 Initiative

We’ve talked about the 2045 Initiative before; it’s basically plan B for life extension: transferring human consciousness to artificial bodies. Since we first covered it, however — five years ago — very little progress has been made. For such a near-term goal (22 years left now), this lack of progress is terminal. The brainchild of Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, the Initiative’s original plan was to upload human consciousness to the cloud, networked virtual reality, or the ‘metaverse’ as some like to call it. Later, the focus changed to life in this world. 

However, the second of Itskov’s four project milestones, to transplant a human brain to a robotic body at the end of its natural life, is meant to be reached by 2025 — two years from the time of writing. The media tycoon hasn’t even reached his first milestone yet (deadlined for 2020), to successfully control a robotic replica of a human body via brain-computer interface (BCI). Although BCI technology is currently being worked on (not by Itskov), it’s nowhere near that level at present. The third milestone is transferring consciousness from human brains to artificial substitutes some time in the next 12 years. This is basically the goal, but there is one further step Itskov hopes to achieve: the fourth milestone, hologram-like avatars or “bodies of light” by 2045.

Transhumanists like Itskov point to the exponential development of technology to justify their ambitious time frames. According to Moore’s law, the power of computers doubles every year and a half. In other words, it’s a faith-based worldview — and it’s one based on just as fundamental a fallacy as any other new religious movement: the totally unfounded conviction that consciousness comes from the brain, from matter, as opposed to the other way round (as philosophers have told us for millennia and even physicists have now come to realize).

The 2045 Initiative isn’t completely detached from reality, though. What we are likely to see within the next two decades is a cult-like trend of unnecessary medical procedures whereby companies rake in billions substituting healthy human body parts for cybernetic hands, legs, eyes, and so on.

This is what happens when the kids are in charge.

Movie villains enshrine themselves forever in our imaginations with their larger-than-life personas, their zany outfits, and of course, their grand and diabolical designs on life as we know it. While some villains’ plans are actually quite ingenious and would have been very hard to undo if not for the last-minute intervention of our intrepid heroes, these are not the type of plans we are here to discuss.

In this list, we will go over villains whose plans seem okay on the surface but are almost laughably bad once you stop to think about them for a minute. Spoilers ahead—you’ve been warned.

10 Emperor’s Plan at End of Rise of Skywalker Is Actually Completely Hilarious

At the end of Rise of Skywalker, we find out the Emperor is alive (with no explanation) and that he has made a thousand Star Destroyers that have planet-destroying super-lasers similar to the one on the Death Stars. However, there are some serious problems with Palpatine’s plan, not even getting into the fact that the element of surprise is useful, and he announces himself before his ships have left dry-dock. Worse yet, though, is that the plan, in general, has more holes than swiss cheese. The thing about the Death Stars is that they were extremely hard to destroy, the first one had a single weak point, and the second one would have been nigh impossible to destroy with a fleet from outside if they had managed to finish building it.

However, star destroyers are quite destructible, and rogue fleets of smaller ships, as we see at the end of the movie, would easily swarm and destroy them before they could get within planet-destroying range. Considering how large the Star Wars galaxy is presumed to be, the random people fighting the empire are just a motley group that Lando threw together in a day; it’s hardly close to the strength of all galactic privateers. Even if they got free, the Emperor’s group of Star Destroyers would have quickly become too spread out and been annihilated by tiny fleets of freighters and suicidal fighter pilots.^[1]

9 Once Scar Tricked Mufasa to His Death, All He Needed Was to Eat Simba

We all know the story of The Lion King, how Scar tricked Mufasa to his death while also making Simba self-exile from guilt, thinking it was his fault. And the truth is, Scar made an absolutely stupendous error. Once Mufasa was gone, all Scar had to do was eat Simba—the little lion cub would have posed no real threat at that size—and then kill and eat any other remaining lion cubs that were not his own offspring. After that, he could simply move in as the leader, and no one would question him.

In the lion kingdom, this is normal behavior. Whenever a new male lion or lions take control of the pride, they simply kill and eat any lion cubs that are not their own offspring and then replenish the pack with their own DNA. While it is a nice Disney movie, they wouldn’t go with such a dark plot. In real life, the story would have been a lot shorter, and Simba would have been in Scar’s belly. For those wondering, only about 20% of lion cubs ever make it to adulthood. ^[2]

8 The Machines in The Matrix Waste Power to Keep Humans Alive

In the first movie, we are told by Morpheus that the robots are keeping us alive in order to use us as giant batteries to keep them powered. However, this is one of the biggest plot holes in movie history because it really doesn’t make any sense. As far as the laws of thermodynamics and science in general go, this is a really dumb idea. Even if you could theoretically make it work, you could generate more power by just burning the resources you are using to keep the humans alive.

The only explanation—apart from it being a plot hole and the writers not understanding science—is that the machines, being partly sentient, are amused by us. Or they have some kind of affection toward us and actually don’t want us entirely destroyed. The battery idea is something they could want us to think, so we don’t realize we are basically a reality show for their amusement.^[3]

7 The Villains in Jurassic World Are So Dumb, Cartoonish Doesn’t Begin to Describe It

Jurassic World is a movie full of stupid choices. From leaving the door open while checking the pen of a supposedly escaped dinosaur (that we know can camouflage) to attacking said dinosaur with a bunch of guys on foot with tranquilizer guns and all the way up to the CEO of the park, who is a novice helicopter pilot, trying to destroy the escapee with a machine gun attachment and ending up crashing into a giant glass enclosure of pterodactyls.

What we are saying is that the decisions in this movie are already some of the dumbest imaginable, and the people in it are all already cartoonishly stupid, but the villains are beyond even that. InGen is up to its old tricks, and they want to train raptors to fight in battle for them, like trained dogs or something. And they somehow believe it will revolutionize warfare.

In order to test this theory, they do a live-fire exercise where they free a bunch of raptors and try to fight alongside them to kill another dinosaur. In order to punish them for their own hubris, the raptors decide to team up with the dinosaur they are meant to catch, and helpfully murder the rest of the park mercenaries they are supposed to be helping.^[4]

6 Erik Killmonger’s Plan Would Work if Wakanda Didn’t Exist in the Marvel Universe

In Black Panther, we learn the “poor” nation of Wakanda is actually a secret paradise of riches and technology, boosted by a rare metal called vibranium native to the region. This technology has allowed them to hide from colonialism, but some felt they should have fought back against it. This included the uncle of the current Black Panther, who was destroyed for his betrayal of his country, leaving behind a son in America.

That son, who goes by the moniker Killmonger, devises a plan to rejoin Wakanda, challenge T’Challa for the throne, and take control of the country. Then he plans to give out vibranium weapons to all the various rebel groups he has throughout the world and start a revolution where they take over and rule from Wakanda as lords of the entire world, finally righting all the wrongs of slavery and colonialism and making sure everyone lives in proper peace and harmony. The problem with this plan is that the Avengers exist, as do all the other superpowered heroes in this universe, one of whom already makes use of vibranium technology.^[5]

5 Professor Moriarty Isn’t Much of a Genius, Just a Jerk With a Lot of Shell Companies

At the beginning of Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows, we learn the world is lurching towards war, and Holmes suspects Moriarty is behind it all. After some very dangerous investigations that almost cost himself, John Watson, and John’s new wife their lives, he discovers that his arch-nemesis Moriarty has been secretly pulling strings to make things worse while being a good friend of the prime minister and a supposed man of peace on the outside. We learn that the real reason Moriarty went to incredibly absurd lengths to start an entire world war is so that he can “own the bullets and the bandages” while people fight. Things he owns by investing in hundreds of shell companies—something Holmes destroys by stealing and decoding his secret notebook.

The silly thing about all this is that there is no need to go to all this trouble and potentially end up getting caught—like he did—and being pulled over a waterfall. You don’t need to start a war to get governments to buy bullets and bandages. They buy them in peacetime anyway and stock up anytime you make things sound slightly worse. Moriarty would probably make more money over time by keeping tensions high but not starting a war, so countries still had strong economies to buy but felt the need to stockpile.^[6]

4 Ozymandias Plan in Watchmen Would Just Start a World War, Not Unite People

In the movie Watchmen, Nixon is in a third term after winning the Vietnam War with the help of superheroes and has now outlawed them further. One anti-hero named Rorschach believes former heroes are being targeted, but it soon becomes clear something more is going on. As the story progresses, the blue, radioactive, god-like superhero Doctor Manhattan is accused of giving people cancer and leaves the Earth in disgrace and sadness.

Not long after this, we reach the lair of another hero named Ozymandias, known to be the smartest and fastest man in the world. After a convoluted final battle, he activates several superweapons that destroy major cities in every major country on Earth, especially the nuclear ones. And he makes it look like it was Doctor Manhattan. The entire world somehow unites behind Doctor Manhattan as a common enemy, who believes it’s best to make them think he did it, so there will be peace and a permanent end to the cold war. He then leaves the planet willingly so the charade will continue.

None of this, of course, makes any sense at all. The fact is that Doctor Manhattan is still seen as an American hero, and even if he did destroy U.S. cities as well, this would almost certainly unite the countries against each other, not just make them angry at Doctor Manhattan. And nations would be especially angry at the USA for unleashing him.^[7]

3 Despite J.K. Rowling’s Justifications, Voldemort’s Plan for His Horcruxes Is Very Stupid

In book six of Harry Potter, we learn Voldemort has been splitting his soul when he kills people and hiding the pieces in objects to anchor himself to the mortal world. Harry, at first, is despairing, wondering at the enormity of the task ahead of them, as Dumbledore explains that all these magic vessels must be destroyed so the dark wizard will no longer be anchored to the Earth. Dumbledore reassures him, though, explaining that Voldemort would have been sentimental and wanted to put them in objects that had value. And also ones he would be able to get back to if he needed to. However, apart from vanity, there is really no reason to put them in anything special; it just makes it easier for your enemies to identify. And to make matters worse, putting them somewhere you can get to them gives your enemies a way to get to them and is basically pointless.

Even if he could put his soul back together, there is no indication he even wanted to, as he thought having it in seven pieces—”the most powerfully magical number”—would be a big deal. And finally, if he had put them in random objects and then magicked them so someone couldn’t get back to them, people would have to keep destroying his body, and he would keep coming back like Ganondorf again and again.^[8]

2 The Aliens in Signs Are So Incompetent It’s Like a Child’s Fevered Dream

In the movie Signs, our heroes start to notice strange crop circles, then weird noises on the radio. Before long, things have escalated to the point that they see a bizarre video on television where what looks like a gray alien is seen walking through the frame. Not long after that, they are huddled in their basement, expecting an impending alien invasion. As the movie progresses, we find that aliens who managed to spend unknown light years traversing the galaxy and have humanlike appendages somehow have more trouble opening doors than a common housecat and cannot break through wood. Also, by the way, they are incredibly weak to water.

When the movie ends, it is accepted that “they came for us, to harvest us,” which leaves us with some of the dumbest aliens imaginable. They are smart enough to have technology that can invade Earth but don’t have bio suits to protect them from water, the most prevalent thing on the planet—something they are deathly allergic to. And they are somehow trying to harvest us, despite us being mostly bags of squishy water with some crunchy bones within. Even after scouting first and setting up landing pads in our fields, they couldn’t even figure out how to protect themselves from water or a baseball bat… and couldn’t open a simple wooden door.^[9]

1 Thanos’s Entire Plan Is Absurd on Its Face

We all know of Thanos’s plan to snap half of all life out of existence using the Infinity Stones in order to solve what he believes is a serious resource problem throughout the galaxy. However, there are a few giant holes in his plan. For one, his plan also has him destroying half of plant and animal life, which doesn’t really fix the resource problem. Suddenly eliminating half of the people does free up some current resources, but it also culls a lot of people who may have been in important positions or doing important things. Now, for argument’s sake, say Thanos thinks of all this and makes sure the snap doesn’t affect people driving a car or flying a plane, so we don’t have extra casualties, leaves a fair distribution of people with the right expertise per region, doesn’t touch plant or animal life, and leaves almost nothing to chance.

Major problems still remain, though, because most resource issues are actually infrastructure related, and for argument’s sake, even if they weren’t, killing a bunch of people doesn’t change the fact people will just breed again. Thanos destroys the stones so no one can undo what he did, but that means he cannot do it again once populations inevitably boom again, especially with all the abundant resources they now have. In the end, Thanos just wants to commit genocide, and no positives would be gained. At least in the comics, they were more honest about it, and he just wanted to do it to be a big shot and impress the female deity that personified death.^[10]

The first genetically engineered organism was created in 1973. That was just bacteria and not something that most everyday people would be excited about, but it set a precedent. Genetic engineering has grown in leaps and bounds since then, usually for the benefit of mankind. Scientific illiteracy and propaganda have made people suspicious of GMOs and now companies proudly proclaim their products aren’t GMO even when a third of all Nobel science laureates have pleaded with governments to make use of them because GMO crops could save literally millions of lives every year. 

So what’s holding us back? It could be these somewhat more bizarre uses of genetic engineering technology. 

10. Bitcoin Mice

When we say plans for genetic engineering, keep in mind that doesn’t necessarily mean execution. No one has done what we’re about to describe yet. They just had the idea. And what idea is that? To encode Bitcoin into the DNA of a mouse. 

The group behind the plan is actually just two guys and they don’t have funding, so don’t expect to see any high value crypto mice on the market anytime soon. The plan, however, is interesting, if nothing else.

The idea here is to store Bitcoin in a cold wallet like anyone might with their cryptocurrency. Then a digital key can be generated, which is also standard. However, things take a left turn at this point. The group’s plan would be to enlist the aid of a genetics firm to translate that key into a genetic ATGC sequence that can be written on DNA. That can then be inserted into a mouse so that a baby mouse can be born with the key encoded in its DNA. The genetics of the mouse will open the wallet and give access to the cryptocurrency therein. 

According to BitMouseDAO, the group that conjured up the idea, the mouse wouldn’t be harmed. And the whole idea is more of an art project than a way to manipulate currency or how it’s used. But for added value, an image of the mouse as an NFT could also be included. 

9. Muscle Dogs

Most genetic engineering is done in a fairly subdued way. One of the most famous cases involved making a strain of rice that was golden yellow and packed with vitamin A that could have saved millions of lives. By and large, yellow rice doesn’t look all that crazy though, and so the rice isn’t particularly shocking in terms of appearances. For that kind of genetic engineering, you need to look at Chinese muscle dogs. 

Researchers edited out a certain gene in the dogs so that they’d develop to be more muscular. In fact, they have twice the muscle mass of normal dogs. And while that sounds like some real mad scientist stuff, it’s arguably for a beneficial purpose.

Dog anatomy and human anatomy are not all that dissimilar in some regards. Researchers were looking into how to prevent human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s, the kinds of conditions that lead to the wasting away of muscle. That said, the possibility of breeding dogs specifically with this mutation also exists which could make them more powerful hunters or runners. And because the mutation works the same in humans, the specific creation of more powerful human athletes could potentially also be a result. 

8. Radiation Cats

The world at large is against genetically modifying things as simple as fruits and vegetables, so you can imagine the uproar if someone started genetically modifying cars, the beloved spokes animals of the internet itself. The idea has been proposed, however, and in the most sci-fi way imaginable.

One of the biggest drawbacks to our current use of nuclear power is the waste it produces. Nuclear waste is very radioactive and dangerous and is going to remain that way for generations. The people who have to deal with these problems have pondered what we can do to save not just people today from radiation, but future people.

The possibility exists that in 10,000 years or so, any language spoken today will be lost. Any knowledge of our nuclear waste storage facilities could be equally lost. How do you warn the people of tomorrow? Radiation cats.

The idea was proposed to create genetically modified cats that would change color when exposed to radiation. That way, in the future, our ancestors will be able to see a visual sign of danger. Presumably the story of what a radiation cat was would somehow be passed down generationally to make the phenomenon something more than a cool trick. 

7. Anti-Cancer Beer

Have you ever heard that drinking red wine can be good for you? This benefit was attributed to a compound found in red grape skins called resveratrol. Resveratrol was shown to be an antioxidant in lab conditions. However, its link to cancer prevention in humans was never really established. That didn’t stop a lot of media stories about the potential after the lab link was established. Enough that some people wanted to look into genetically engineering beer to also have resveratrol in it. 

A team from Rice University was cooking up a plan to use resveratrol enriched yeast to brew beer back in 2008. They even entered the beer in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition that year and won the gold medal. Most of the students involved in the project weren’t even old enough to legally drink the beer that they were creating. 

6. Dinosaur Snout Chickens

When was the first time you heard that chickens are actually dinosaurs? This was a popular headline back in 2015. But the real link started making the media rounds back in 2007. So we’ve all had a good bit of time to adjust to the idea that chickens and dinosaurs are pretty closely related. 

Science took things one step further in 2017 when they decided to see if they could turn a chicken back into a dinosaur. A little genetic engineering was needed to determine how a dinosaur face evolved into a beak, and then efforts were put into switching those genes off again so that a beak could turn back into a dinosaur snout. Research had been going for some years towards this goal, and a team at Yale had altered chicken embryos to basically reverse engineer a dinosaur face. The chickens were never taken beyond the embryonic state, so no dino-chickens were actually running around. 

The researchers have gained insight into the evolutionary process, as was the goal. Conceivably, however, this research could also be used towards the goal of engineering future dinosaur-like animals, although such research would widely be considered unethical. 

5. Daddy Short Legs

There are over 45,000 species of spiders in the world and most of us can only recognize a few by name. Of those, the Daddy Long Legs has to be one of the most famous. But odds are no one would recognize the genetically altered version made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This new version was missing the hallmark of the species and instead had little stub legs, so they called it a Daddy Short Legs. The team were able to identify and switch off a pair of genes related to leg development in the spiders. This helped gain insight into the evolutionary process that gave the spiders long legs in the first place. Now if you want to know why that’s important, well, that’s just a science thing. Scientists like to know why things happen the way they do. 

4. Vaccine Bananas 

These last few years have really brought vaccines to the forefront of people’s mind around the world. But have you ever wondered why vaccines are almost always distributed the same way? Sure, going to a pharmacy or hospital and getting an injection makes sense, but what if there was another way? For instance, what if we could eat a vaccine? What if we could genetically modify a banana to provide vaccination against a disease?

Anti-vaxxers would no doubt flip their lids at the concept, but vaccine bananas were actively pursued for a time. The idea stumbled, however, and maybe for reasons that aren’t readily apparent. 

One of the big drawbacks was unreliability. Delivering specific doses and the stability of the antigens in a food suffered too many variables. Just look at the bananas in the store next time you go. Some are giant and some are small. Is the dose the same if they’re delivering vaccines? What if you eat a whole bunch, is it safe?

Other issues included immune tolerance, government regulations and good ol’ social resistance since people are already predisposed to mistrust GMOs.Still, the idea of using things like tomatoes to vaccinate against hepatitis B is still floated from time to time. 

3. Safer Pig Poop 

How worried are you about the chemical composition of pig poop? Canada struggled with this very issue, and in 2010, scientists there did something about it. The Enviropig was introduced to be a more environmentally friendly porker.

The genetically modified pigs were designed to produce less phosphorus when they pooped. The problem here is one most of us would never realize. All animals need phosphorus. It helps build cells and many other functions of life. Pigs get their phosphorus in feed but cannot digest phytate, a molecule made up chiefly of phosphorus. Farmers supplement an enzyme called phytase in their diets, which helps them digest it. But it’s inefficient and a lot of phosphorus gets excreted by pigs. 

Phosphorus from pig feces builds up in the water supply, feeding algae and creating biological dead zones with no oxygen. So the Enviropig was modified to not need phytase and excrete 40% less phosphorus as a result. The end result is a pig that helps the environmentally friendly and saves money on feed supplements. 

2. Spider Silk Goats 

Spider silk is stronger than steel, though in practical terms there are a lot of limitations to what that statement means. Still, being able to manufacture spider silk would surely have practical uses, right? That’s what researchers thought when they genetically engineered goats to produce it. The silk was produced by incorporating silk-spinning genes into the goats so that silk could be harvested along with the goat’s milk.

There are potentially dozens of applications for large-scale production from medical to textile and military. But spiders are very hard to farm and they tend to kill each other. Goats are much easier.  Nine years after Canadian scientists made the first two spider goats, and another facility was overseeing 20 of them. It’s still small scale, but it hasn’t gone away. 

1. Cyborg Dragonfly

If you want to go all out with genetic engineering, why not throw cybernetics into the mix as well? That’s how you end up with a cyborg dragonfly drone that mixes a genetically engineered insect with machinery all in one place. 

Real life drones are bulky, relatively speaking, when compared to insects. Scientists have tried to understand how something as small as an insect can have the energy to zip around at high speeds in such a small package when we can’t do the same with robotics. Tiny batteries are terribly inefficient. 

The solution seems to be making an insect a robot. A dragonfly was modified with neurons in its spine to make it steerable. With a tiny computer backpack to gather data and also charge the tech with a solar panel, the dragonfly can be piloted by remote control as light sensors are used to send signals to its brain. The result is a tiny, living spy that could get into places few humans or drones could. Does it open the possibility of up-scaling the tech and controlling more complex animals? Maybe so.

Silicon Valley centillionaires and billionaires, the new feudal lords, are apparently big time preppers. It’s understandable. They enjoy the spoils of their deal with the work machine and want to save what they can of the high life. Of course, with all that clout they could save the whole world.

But no, here’s how they plan to leave us, and their dignity, to perish. 

10. Larry Page’s desert island hideout

One of many tech titans frightened of dying is Google co-founder Larry Page. His Calico Labs is hard at work on a quixotic fight against death. In the meantime, though, he still has to weather the storm. 

His survival plan, at least in the case of a pandemic, is to hide on his island in Fiji. That’s what he did during COVID-19. Under the pretext of delivering medical supplies – and by virtue of being a billionaire – he was allowed to enter the isolated (and therefore otherwise safe) country when it was closed to everyone else, flying in on his jet from Hawaii. 

Understandably, he tried to keep it a secret by getting the state-owned media to pull their story on the visit, as well as hiding all traces on Google. But no amount of influence could silence a disgruntled sailor, who spilled the beans to the rest of the world.

9. Marvin Liao’s medieval armory

Citing the example of Ukraine, tech investor Marvin Liao says there’s always a conqueror at the gate. He also worries about a pandemic and the impending financial collapse. But he’s prepared. Apparently, he’s “amassed an arsenal of non-firearm weapons and taken archery classes” so he won’t have to rely on ammunition. 

He also insists on martial arts, knife fighting, and fitness in general. Being able to run without getting winded is vital, he says. But so is financial freedom. Like Jesse Eisenberg in Zombieland, Liao has a number of slogans that he hopes will keep him alive. “Physically Fit & Financially Lit” is one. There’s also “Don’t Be Sorry, Be Better” and, encouragingly for a centillionaire survivalist, “No (wo)Man is an Island,” 

Liao is, unlike many on this list, a believer in banding together – at least in a fight post-apocalypse. “There is power in the collective,” he notes, “and three people will almost always take out one … no matter how well trained they are.”

8. Sam Altman’s “manifest destiny”

Sam Altman, the centillionaire head of OpenAI (the company responsible for the monstrous GPT-3 chatbot), has been a proud prepper for a years. He told The New York Times back in 2016 that he was stockpiling “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur.” 

Another article – entitled “Sam Altman’s manifest destiny” – describes “his utter lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us.” It also lists some of the scenarios he’s prepared for: homicidal AI; nuclear war over resources; and the release of a synthetic virus.

Societal collapse is another one. When that happens he’ll flee to New Zealand with his friend Peter Thiel.

7. Peter Thiel’s New Zealand eyesore

“Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven,” said a post on the prepper website the Modern Survivalist. It’s a growing sentiment in New Zealand. The island nation’s self-sufficiency, temperate climate, lack of enemies, and arable terrain endear it to anxious Americans. That it’s also where The Lord of the Rings was shot is a bonus for Peter Thiel, who named his companies after the trilogy. 

An investor in anti-ageing and cryogenics research, Thiel is afraid of dying – which is pretty understandable given his belief in Hell. Not only does he want to vampirize children, he supports authoritarianism and hoped Trump would become a dictator. He also bankrupted Gawker for outing him. He is, as the Guardian put it, the “human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.”

Naturally, he wants to keep going. So he lied and bribed his way into New Zealand and bought a city-sized chunk of the South Island. When the story broke in the press, locals were scandalized. Despite Thiel’s promises to invest in the country, they all knew what he was there for: to survive the collapse of Western civilization. Fortunately, his plans for a fortress – which included a spa and theater – were deemed an “eyesore” by Kiwis and rejected.

6. Bill Gates’s crawlspace hideyholes

Bill Gates is, as Ice Cube said, a “bunker bitch.” He’s among the many panicked rich Americans flocking to companies like Vivos – specialists in taking money from billionaires in exchange for apocalypse bunkers. According to Vivos founder Robert Vicino, “Gates has huge shelters under every one of his homes, in Rancho Santa Fe and Washington.”

He joins the ranks of other many narcissists – bankers, movie stars, athletes – who, according to The Hollywood Reporter, are shelling out millions for protection. They’re not just worried about World War III, though; what they really want to hide from is us. Among their chief concerns are the riots arising from economic collapse. This tells us all we need to know about their sense of civic duty – as well as their outlook for the future. The CFO of Ultimate Bunker, another elite survival firm, said “everyone [in these circles] thinks we are doomed, no matter who is elected.”

But really they’re doomed no matter how much they spend. Bunkers aren’t magic. All it would take is a hungry mob of veteran marines with high-level bunker-busting skills.

5. Mark Zuckerberg’s re-colonization of Kauai

Mark Zuckerberg’s proud of his Kauai estate but he doesn’t want you knowing how he got it. It wasn’t always 750 acres. The original lot was apparently too small for his ironic obsession with privacy, so he forced his neighbors to sell – just as he had before in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Lake Tahoe. Except this time his “neighbors” were native Hawaiians and their lots were kuleana land promised by colonists in the past. Those who resisted Zuckerberg’s land grab were sued. And, adding insult to injury, his land encompassed burial sites – forcing locals to ask permission to visit.

He said he wants to “plant roots” here, but some think that just means building a bolthole “in case society collapses.” He clearly doesn’t care about friending the locals; he’s built walls around his land and surrounds himself with henchmen.

He’s also done significantly less than nothing for the island’s many unsheltered people.

4. Larry Ellison’s super secret master plan

Larry Ellison is – according to Bob Sutton, author of The No A**hole Rule – “25 to 30 times more a**holy” than Steve Jobs. Not only has the aging software billionaire been a political megadonor, he’s also conquered an entire Hawaiian island for himself. His personal mantra, which he stole from Genghis Khan, is: “It is not sufficient that I succeed—all others must fail.”

For just $300 million of his hundred-plus billions, he bought 98% of the 90,000-acre Lanai. As for the people who lived there, in true colonial fashion he pretty much enslaved them overnight – becoming everyone’s boss, landlord (on strictly 30-day leases), or both. But that isn’t the point. Since the start of COVID-19, when he moved to the island himself, changes have been gathering pace. These include Lanai’s first “longevity spa”. 

Ellison claims to be working toward sustainability, but the locals call waha (“bullsh**”) on that. So far, he’s done nothing for the wildlife and ecology. There is, however, some indication that he wants to make the island self-sufficient. He’s got scientists tracking rainfall and plans for a desalination plant and hydroponic farm. They won’t be for the island’s rightful owners, though. Secret visits from the likes of Tom Cruise and Benjamin Netanyahu suggest Ellison’s building a refuge for the rich. We may never know. As Bloomberg notes, Ellison “hasn’t offered the public many details of his master plan.” 

3. Elon Musk’s mad dash for Mars

Elon Musk is worried about everything: climate change, artificial intelligence, population collapse, WWIII… So it should come as no surprise that, of all the (rational) doomsday contingency plans on this list, his is the most ambitious: Migrating into space via Mars.

To be fair to the billionaire, he’s not just trying to save himself – he’s trying to save the species. In fact, he plans to land one million humans on the Red Planet, 100 per ship, within decades. He even plans to bring the cost down, from $10 billion to $200,000 a ticket. And while this is still too much for most to afford, he denies it’s an “escape hatch for rich people.” There’s a “good chance you’ll die” on a mission to Mars, he says, but “excitement for those who … survive.”

Among other things, he envisions “pizza joints,” “great bars,” and, with 38% the gravity of Earth, the illusion of super strength. “Mars is gonna be a great place to go,” he says, “the planet of opportunity.” Veteran astronauts disagree. Stanley Love, who’s spent over 300 hours in space and lived on a base in Antarctica, insists that life on Mars would be “horrible.” Everything would have to be rationed. People would get claustrophobic. And the low Martian gravity would also decrease their muscle mass and bone density, making colonists weaker and more prone to fractures. Even if they did find their way back to Earth, they wouldn’t return to their lives.

2. Jeff Bezos’s outer space pipe dream

Like many billionaires, especially in tech, Jeff Bezos is big into life extension. One of his major investments since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 was Altos Labs – a(nother) longevity research lab. He seems to be obsessed with time running out, having also dumped millions on a “10,000-year clock” inside a mountain (which some suspect is a doomsday clock).

But, like Elon Musk, he hopes to save the planet – not just himself. Expecting humans to drain every last viable energy source on Earth within the next couple of centuries, Bezos intends to shoot us into space. In a mad speech based on the ideas of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, he envisioned settlements aboard cylinders spinning through the solar system. Each colony (of the millions he dreams of) would be built by robots with materials from the Moon and shot into space by a catapult. They’d be miles on end to house a million people each and have alternating stripes of land and window – as well as mirrors and solar panels for energy. Different colonies could have their own themes and functions, he said, such as replicas of ancient cities, wilderness areas, zero G recreational colonies, and so on.

Fortunately, the obstacles are many (technology, cost, social organization, etc.); because the ultimate problem is Bezos himself. His own contributions to climate change and individualist consumerism aside, his treatment of workers as Amazon’s CEO suggests he doesn’t really care about people. In fact, there’s good reason to think his “colonies” will be no more than glorified prisons – or “captive labor towns in space” as NBC put it. 

1. Dmitry Itskov’s escape into the Matrix

Dmitry Itskov, “the “godfather” of the Russian Internet,” wants to celebrate his 10,000th birthday. Needless to say, the odds are stacked against him. As his manifesto says, “civilization stands on the threshold of a series of global crises … threatening the environment where human beings live, and their existence as a species.” His solution, however, is not as you might expect to follow Musk and Bezos into space; it’s to jettison his body instead.

By 2045, he hopes to transition to a holographic nanobot avatar – or at least to a life in the metaverse. This will of course be a gradual process. For example, he thinks we’ll see the first generation of basic robot avatars deployed in dangerous environments (for example by the emergency services, miners, etc.). Then they’ll be used as replacement bodies for the physically disabled (paraplegics, the terminally ill, etc.). According to Itskov’s schedule, we should be at this stage by 2025. Next would be the transfer of individual consciousness to these bodies. In other words, by 2035 if we get back on schedule, everyone would have “the possibility of cybernetic immortality.” In the decade after that we’ll effectively become a new species, with “bodies consisting of nanorobots … and capable of taking any form.”

Clearly Itskov’s a bit behind schedule, so the emphasis now is on the metaverse – or eternal life in the Matrix.