The SpaceX founder has a plan that seems to some to be downright nutty, but don't expect that to deter this bold entrepreneur.
This may be the craziest thing SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk has ever said, and that’s saying something. The enigmatic billionaire and space visionary claims that it’s possible to build a city of a million people on Mars by 2062, and he’s not joking.
Musk, like famed physicist Stephen Hawking, believes that mankind needs to find a way off Earth as soon as possible, as humans could be wiped away with a single doomsday event, and we are increasingly making the planet less inhabitable through global warming. But when it comes to ambitious plans, it’s hard to top the idea that we’ll have a city as large as some of the largest U.S. cities built on the Red Planet within the next few decades, especially since we haven’t even figured out how to get one person there yet.
Musk described his plans in the journal New Space, discussing a “Mars Colonial Fleet” of 1,000 craft that could take multiple trips and bring a population of a million people to Mars over 40 to 100 years. He thinks Mars is easily the best candidate for the first human colony after Earth, and thinks we can do a lot to make it more habitable.
“By talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture, I want to make Mars seem possible—make it seem as though it is something that we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to,” Musk wrote in his essay. “I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”
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