Last week, I watched Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and Space X give a speech at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico about the next big thing in space exploration. He had been planning and working towards colonizing Mars, but his idea was unsurprisingly flawed in the eyes of a lot of other aerospace enthusiasts, and during his speech, he laid to rest the worries of a lot of these people by letting everyone know exactly how he planned to transport humans to Mars for the approximate price of a two bedroom house in Wisconsin ($200,000).

I was still awestruck and wide-eyed 5 hours after watching the video, as I begun to become even more entrapped by the vision of humans having an alternative place to call home. Ever since the movie, 'The Martian', the conversation regarding life on another planet has grown more and more booming. It is an idea that has toyed with the minds of everyone at some point or the other, and now that there is a concrete plan to accomplish this, the conversation is only bound to grow louder and louder. The turning point, however, is the fact that according to Musk, the first people to go to Mars must be ready to die!

Is bringing our species out of the bubble worth sacrificing one's life for? The answer for anyone who sees the big picture is a thunderous, resounding YES! As an interplanetary species, we will no longer be limited to the already depleting natural resources of earth or the limitations that its atmosphere imposes on us. Anyone with even an ounce of an adventurous spirit will not hesitate if given a free ticket to Mars armed with the resources Musk plans to ship out with his inaugural extraterrestrials. Humans by nature are only limited by what they have yet to accomplish, and so attaining an interplanetary status as a species will inevitably lead to a conversation on intergalactic travel. This might all seem like fiction, but 50 years ago, a car that drove itself sounding like something out of the latest terminator.

This is not only a matter of adventure but a quest for survival. It is no longer tabloid news that our sun who provides us with the favorable weather that makes our existence a reality will inevitably be the death of us, and the only thing that can possibly save us is moving to a different solar system or galaxy. These are issues that may seem extremely long-term, but in the words of Benjamin Frankin, 'Failure to plan is preparing to fail', and so if our existence is of priority to us-even if we might be dead then-, then it is in our own best interests to begin to think as crazily as Elon Musk and come up with ways to escape the bounds and limitations of our earth as a planet, and as a member of a board of heavenly bodies slowly planning our destruction.