If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to a dangerous frontier.
My money is still on the Pilgrim-types to lead the way, at least in the early waves. But I did wonder, while sitting in its airport last week, if interplanetary human civilisation might one day end up looking something like Dubai.
Dubai operates rather like a space colony. It depends on desalinated sea water and imports almost all of its food. Temperatures can approach 50˚C in the summer, with no rain to speak of, and construction workers frequently die of heat exhaustion. This is an environment exquisitely hostile to human life, hence the air-conditioned sand on Dubai’s most luxurious beaches. For the wealthy, life is lived indoors for many months, under artificial lighting. Nevertheless, out of the desert has sprung a prosperous, hi-tech, cosmopolitan society that bright young chancers want to be a part of.
British chancers, above all. The population of Dubai has grown from 20,000 to more than three million in just 75 years, and British citizens represent the largest western community by some distance. There are estimated to be as many as a quarter of a million Brits living in Dubai, plus a similar number in neighbouring Abu Dhabi, and their numbers will keep growing. Tens of thousands of British people are moving to the Gulf every year, and there has been a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in UK searches for ‘move to Dubai’ and ‘jobs in Dubai’.
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