In 2017, the government of Dubai announced plans to create the first human settlement on Mars within one hundred years. This article considers how the ‘Mars 2117’ project and its Earth-bound beta tests represent an increasingly global vanguard relationship to the materials we call nature, combined with a world-forming narrative where the goal of politics is about making a new kind of habitat, rather than the creation of a polis. Mars 2117 reveals the ways in which the present grounds for authoritarian legitimacy specifically in the UAE are, in effect, on loan, for which the future functions as a form of collateral for its present day governance structure, and is hedged upon the engineered anticipation of a people, a place, and most importantly, an infrastructure to come. This form of authority is being innovated to skip over political contradictions, environmental limits, and the precarity of a tumultuous and potential catastrophic future caused by the feedback between peak oil and irreversible climate change. Anticipatory authoritarianism is an answer, even if not a solution, to a dialectic of destruction created by contemporary global labor practices and carbon economy-ecology.