While the United States has big plans for the Red Planet, the race for Mars could begin with Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
A Danish architect says he will start building a Mars Science City as a first step in the bid to colonize the Red Planet in the coming decades. Bjarke Ingels said at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday that Dubai would be the first step of that journey, even though countries like the United States are leading the charge to build rockets to take mankind there.
Ingels, who Time named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016, said that within a century humans will be the first species to inhabit another planet. It is certainly a big hurdle to get to Mars, expected to last three months to cross the 600 million kilometer distance between the Red Planet and Earth.
But the first step will be to build a Mars Science City, which will happen in Dubai, Ingels said. The project was actually announced last September in Abu Dhabi, and it will simulate life on Mars with laboratories for food, energy, and water.
The Dubai Future Foundation is planning on an Emirates city on Mars by 2117, and this will be part of that step.
That is certainly behind the timetable of other projects, including NASA’s, which hopes to start a colony in the 2030s, and Elon Musk of SpaceX, who thinks it can be done by the mid 2020s. His recent launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket is widely seen as a big first step to that goal, as the rocket is big enough and powerful enough to send mankind on the long of a journey.
Leave a Reply