There are questions it becomes in vogue to ask celebrities. Would you consider yourself a feminist? What do you think of “cancel culture?” It’s not super productive to spring these types of Q’s on our favorite pop stars, actors, and other performers. It’s kind of a no-win situation for most of them and us. So here’s a humble proposal. Why don’t we ask our most luminous luminaries this instead: If given the opportunity, would you want to die in space? Or even better: Would you want to die on Mars with Elon Musk?
Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. We know that. He launched a whole company so he could travel there and now he wants to meet his timely end on the red planet too. In 2013, when SpaceX was over a decade old already, he said as much at SXSW, “I will go if I can be assured that SpaceX would go on without me . . . I’ve said I want to die on Mars, just not on impact.”
Cool! That’s one! Now, the mother of two of Musk’s nine children (at last count) is also down to clown (die) in space. Grimes, who also goes by c, as in the speed of light, told Wired that she’s into the idea. Wired didn’t even ask her if she wanted to die in space. The journalist just asked her if she wanted to go to space and she said, “Definitely. I hope to die in space. I would like to go far enough out there to where my body could not handle coming back. So it would be closer to the end of my life. Maybe 65.”
It sounds like she wants to be blasted into space to die right when she reaches about the age she can avail of Social Security benefits. But this is a maybe. She also said she’d die on Mars. “Mars would be great,” she said. “I hope there’s a megastructure by then because I would love to see one in space. I’d go out there and live as long as I can until I die.”
She left a couple of caveats, like if her kids need help with their kids, and she’d like to wait until they turn 25 and “are good.” Still, that’s not her preference. “I think if I died on Earth, in my last moments I would regret it,” she said, but: “If I died in space, I would be like, ‘You’ve lived a great life, you did all the things you wanted to do.’”
Listen, this might seem bonkers to your average Earthling. At present, space tourism just lets you go up in a big rocket for seven seconds, kiss the sky, and come down again for seven seconds. The idea that in our lifetime, or at least in Grimes’s lifetime, there could be some kind of Martian living situation, is a little out there. But you know what? I’m glad these billionaires and the mothers of their children are considering death at all. Some are choosing to try and forgo that bit of the human experience. But these mega-rich people? The Grimes and the Musks? The ones that will concede to die at all, if only in space? They’re basically just like us.
\