Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on another planet? Would the sky still be blue? Would there still be oceans and green grass? Would there be other worldly creatures living there too? Well you’re in luck, the new word on the street is that Elon Musk wants to have at least one million people on Mars by the 2060s!
Elon Musk is a South African-born, Canadian-American business man who is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO and product architect for Tesla, the Motors Chairman of SolarCity and Co-Chairman of OpenAl. Throughout the years, Musk has also co-founded many other companies, including but not limited to X.com and PayPal. He has also been accredited for new and state of the art transportation concepts, like the Hyperloop, which is a high-speed transportation system where there are pressurized capsules which ride on an air cushions that are then driven by motors and air compressors.
Musk is a very interesting and innovative man to say the least. Between his ideas of the Hyperloop, all of the companies he is a part of and now the idea of having people live on Mars is just beyond me. Musk believes that it is possible for Mars to become the new home to a colony of self-sustaining humans on Mars in about 40 to 100 years’ time. He said in an interview with National Geographic that “the future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions: either we are going to become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we are going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event.”
Since Musk believes that we should be a space-faring civilization, he thinks it is possible for humans to be flying to Mars by the year 2020! But in order to get to Mars, a rocket must be built that can sustain the six month long trip it would take to get there and then another six months to come back to Earth. A rocket that would be able to sustain this distance would have to be about 200 feet tall with a rocket booster that can accelerate the entire ship to 5,374 miles per hour. Fast, right?
Once the spaceship is en route for Mars, solar panels would deploy from the ship in order to harvest energy from the sun to help sustain life and conserve propellant once it is time to land on Mars. Musk would also like to be able to reuse the spaceships in order to help keep sustainability alive on the Red Planet. People will always have the option of returning to Mother Earth, but he would inevitably like to have at least a million people on Mars 40 to 100 years after the first spaceship is launched.
Since water is not necessarily found on the surface of Mars, the first human settlers will have to be able to dig beneath the surface and find buried ice that can then be used to help sustain the new civilization. Builders and other innovators should be interested in travelling to Mars, too, in order to help build the new civilization and explore the new world that they could call home.
While Musk’s plan may seem other-worldly and something straight out of a science fiction movie, he believes that he can pull it off and I do too. The age of space exploration to a new planet is the modern day expedition to the new world, like the journey Christopher Columbus embarked on in the early 1490's. I cannot wait to see how Musk's exciting plan for humans to live on Mars plays out in the coming years.
