Today's Wisdom - Mars, MBAs and Sonnets

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The question of when humans will live on Mars has shifted over the last decade from science fiction speculation into a genuine engineering debate. Elon Musk has been the most vocal and the most specific about timelines for Mars colonization while building the only private rocket company to make large-scale transport appear technically plausible. SpaceX's Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed, completed its first successful full flight test in 2024 after a series of spectacular explosions that the company framed, with some justification, as accelerated learning rather than failure. NASA's own internal projections, historically far more conservative than anything Musk publishes, have quietly shifted from the 2040s toward the late 2030s as a realistic window for a crewed Mars landing. The gap between landing on Mars and living on Mars, however, is where the conversation becomes genuinely sobering.

The obstacles between a successful crewed landing and a self-sustaining human settlement are not primarily technological. Rocket engineering is the area where humanity has made the most concrete progress. The harder problems are biological, psychological, and logistical in ways that no amount of additional funding fully resolves on a short timeline. A one-way journey to Mars takes between six and nine months depending on the alignment of the two planets, during which astronauts are exposed to cosmic radiation at levels that current shielding technology cannot adequately reduce, raising lifetime cancer risk significantly with every mission. Mars has no global magnetic field and an atmosphere so thin it provides virtually no protection from solar radiation on the surface. The planet's gravity sits at roughly 38 percent of Earth's, and nobody yet knows what prolonged exposure to that level does to the human body over years. The longest continuous period any human has spent in microgravity is about fourteen months.

The most honest answer to the question of when we will live on Mars, meaning genuinely live there in a permanent and self-sustaining way rather than visit and survive, is probably sometime in the second half of this century, assuming the political will and funding hold across multiple decades and multiple governments. A crewed landing, which is a different and considerably easier milestone, could plausibly happen in the late 2030s if SpaceX maintains its current trajectory and NASA sustains its Artemis program as a stepping stone. But a colony requires solving complex problems in closed-loop life support, radiation medicine, and in-situ resource utilization. What is different now compared to any previous point in history is that these problems are being worked on extremely seriously, with real hardware, by people who expect to see solutions in their lifetimes.

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For most of human history, the idea that commerce could be taught in a classroom would have struck merchants, traders, and industrialists as faintly absurd. Business knowledge moved through apprenticeships, family dynasties, and the kind of hard-won experience that left people either wealthy or ruined. The great universities of Europe occupied themselves with theology, law, and philosophy. That began to shift in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution had created corporations so vast and so complex that no single founder's instincts could run them anymore. The first modern collegiate business school in the United States was the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, a steel and nickel industrialist who had watched America's corporations expand beyond the capacity of anyone actually running them. Wharton donated one hundred thousand dollars to establish a program in finance and economics, and in doing so invented an institution that would reshape how power was distributed across the entire twentieth century.

Harvard Business School arrived in 1908 and created a method that would spread across the world. The case study system, adapted from Harvard Law School and still the dominant pedagogy in elite business education today, rested on the idea that students learn best by wrestling with real decisions made by real companies under genuine pressure. Professors would present a detailed account of a business situation at the moment of crisis, withhold what actually happened, and force students to argue their way to a conclusion in front of sixty of their most competitive peers. The method was brilliant as a teaching tool and even more brilliant as a piece of institutional branding, because it meant Harvard was always teaching from the frontier of practice. By the mid-twentieth century, the MBA had become the master key of American corporate life, a credential that unlocked boardrooms, consulting firms, investment banks, and eventually the corridors of government with a reliability that no other qualification could match.

The critique of business schools has been present almost as long as business schools themselves. The most forensic version of the argument, developed by the academic Henry Mintzberg over several decades, holds that MBA programs select for a particular kind of sharp, quantitative intelligence and then spend two years rewarding it with case studies designed to produce confident answers under artificial time pressure. It argues these schools graduate people who are extraordinarily good at looking decisive while being genuinely underprepared for the patience, ambiguity, and human complexity that leadership actually demands. The financial crisis of 2008 brought renewed attention to this critique. The institutions most responsible for the collapse were staffed at their senior levels almost entirely by people with credentials from the world's most prestigious business schools. That correlation, however, is not the same as causation. The same schools also supply leadership to industries and institutions that function effectively, and the crisis itself was driven as much by regulatory failures, incentive structures, and macroeconomic conditions as by individual decision-making. Still, programs that had spent decades advertising their ability to produce ethical, visionary leaders had apparently been producing something rather different. Business schools added ethics courses, sustainability requirements, and modules on stakeholder capitalism. The starting salaries of their graduates continued to rise. Applications continued to grow. Whatever else the MBA may have failed to teach across its century of existence, it has never once failed to understand its own market.

William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, almost certainly between the mid-1590s and around 1610, and they were published without any clear evidence that he authorized the publication or intended them to be read as a unified sequence. That ambiguity has never left them. For four centuries, scholars, poets, and readers have returned to the same unresolved questions about who the poems were written for and what they reveal about the man who wrote them. The sonnets are divided into two broad groups. The first 126 are addressed to a beautiful young man, urging him to marry and have children so that his beauty might survive him. The final twenty-eight are addressed to a mysterious and difficult woman described with unusual frankness as dark-complexioned and morally unreliable, a figure who has become known simply as the Dark Lady.

The young man sequence contains some of the most technically perfect poetry in the English language, and also some of the most emotionally raw. Sonnet 18, which opens with the line comparing a beloved to a summer's day, is the most famous, but it is in many ways the most conventional of the group. The more interesting sonnets are arguably the ones where the voice fractures. Sonnet 66 is a catalogue of exhaustion with the world, ticking through its grievances with a weariness that sounds startlingly modern. Sonnet 129 is a brutal, almost clinical dissection of lust, describing desire as a kind of madness that the person experiencing it fully understands to be destructive and pursues anyway. Sonnet 116 defines love as something that does not alter when it finds alteration in others, a definition so clean and so frequently quoted at weddings that most people who know it have never thought seriously about how demanding a standard it actually sets. Throughout the sequence, the speaker navigates jealousy, aging, betrayal, rivalry, and an attachment to the young man that reads, across the distance of four centuries, as something considerably more complicated than admiration.

What the sonnets ultimately give us is the closest thing to an inner life that Shakespeare ever committed to paper. The plays are full of psychology but they are distributed across characters, any one of which Shakespeare could claim was pure invention. The sonnets use the first person, and the emotions in them are too specific and too contradictory to read entirely as literary exercise. He writes about feeling old when he probably was not yet forty. He writes about public shame in terms that suggest something real. Whether any of it is strictly autobiographical is a question that cannot be settled, but the sonnets reward reading as if it might be. This is when they stop being monuments of English literature and start being the record of a recognisably human mind trying to make sense of love, time, and the uncomfortable distance between who we are and who we wish we were.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team