You decide!
You can find many links between outfits like Lockheed Martin and corporate front-groups such as the Mars Society. The Mars Society line is that the Earth is a rotting, dying, stinking planet and we need to terraform Mars and move our civilization there. Likely ride on a nuclear powered rocket to a nuclear powered Martian mining colony. I’m not interested in that trip.
I hope when the opportunity comes to settle Mars, Bruce’s lack of interest is typical of his kind. The rest of us will be more than accommodating to this desire to be left behind.
ETA: naturally, Bruce either misunderstands the point of the Mars Society or is dishonestly misrepresenting it. It’s not that “Earth is a rotting, dying, stinking planet and we need to terraform Mars and move our civilization there”, for the MS it’s that the Earth is a single eggbasket, that we would be wise to establish human civilization on another planet as insurance, and that both planets will benefit from the exercise in terms of social, cultural, technological, and economic innovation.
I suspect that his vitriolic misrepresentation of the Mars Society’s aims has more to do with his own negative, cynical, and self-loathing view of humanity. And it’s actually Bruce and his fellow travelers who see the Earth as a rotting, dying, stinking planet, as they make abundantly clear through their incessant guilt-wracked Chicken Littleing over the apocalyptic consequences of any human activity whatsoever – including, no matter how ‘environmentally conscious’, their own.
Now, I can’t speak for the Mars Society, but personally I like Earth. It’s a great planet. My thoughts on settling Mars coincide with how I’ve described the Mars Society’s above. But to those I would add my desire to get the hell away from people like Bruce and other Rand villains brought to cartoonish life, who are doing everything they can – despite whatever they claim or believe to be their intentions – to turn Earth into “a rotting, dying, stinking planet” mixing beehive commune, neolithic village, pharaonic hierarchy, and police state in proportions varying according to their individual ideological tastes.
ETA2: I missed this earlier – note here the use of the unsupported assertion, ubiquitous among leftists, that any organization with which one disagrees is necessarily a “front group” or astroturf or the like. By this tactic leftists attempt to dishonestly discredit and disqualify their opposition with the implication that the opposition is paid to lie, manipulate, etc. on behalf of this or that Goldsteined locus of wealth and/or power, thus anything the opposition says regarding its goals or philosophy or any facts or arguments it presents are to be dismissed out of hand.
Nice tactic, if you can make it stick. Demonizing the opposition as a seductive font of lies relieves one of the terrible burden of actually having to craft a reasoned argument in response to their words and deeds, a coherent explanation of one’s disagreement with their aims, or a persuasive presentation of one’s own position. Emotional manipulation and strident moralizing require less effort and intellectual capacity.