SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long promised that he will make humans compatible with the establishment of a habitable space on Mars.
With the help of his space company’s giant Starship rocket, the mercurial entrepreneur wants to ensure the “long-term survival of consciousness” by transporting a million citizens to live permanently on the Red Planet by 2050.
But his lofty plans for a highly dangerous place more than a million miles from home could be doomed from the start.
As biologist and author Kelly Weinersmith and her husband, cartoonist Zach Weinersmith, detailed in their 2023 researched book “A City on Mars: Can We Renovate Space, Should We Renovate Space, and Have We Really Thought This Over?” the world is a terrible place to live.
In fact, they predict, the effort could quickly turn into a disaster-prone and costly humanitarian effort of extreme proportions.
In a new interview with CNNthe two explained their new doubts.
“When we got into it – by the second year out of four years of research, we were like, well, there’s a lot we don’t know that we still want to know,” Kelly told the broadcaster. “And if we do this too soon, it could be a moral hazard.”
“There’s no way you can get up to a million people on Mars without something catastrophic happening,” he continued, “maybe in terms of that it’s going to happen that we can’t have babies up there, and mothers and babies are dying or getting cancer.”
“If you want to do this, it should be a slow process of generations to build until we can be self-sufficient on Mars,” he added.
In the short term, however, the Red Planet could prove to be a good place for “a lot of research,” according to Kelly.
“Maybe in our lifetime, we will see people land on Mars, explore and come home, it could happen, but I don’t think we will have children on Mars,” he said.
Fertility in particular may be a major problem due to the global amount of radiation exposure. The effects of microgravity in space – or only 38 percent of Earth’s gravitational pull on Mars – can also be a major concern.
“We were just surprised by how many problems we thought we had to fix,” Kelly said CNN. “But it turns out that we have very little data on how adults will behave, let alone how reproduction will go.”
The authors’ concerns are closely aligned with other experts who have criticized Musk’s plan to control Mars.
Beyond the political, technological, and ethical questions, it could end up being very expensive, even for the richest man in the world.
Then there are the threats we face on Earth, such as the environmental crisis that is being exacerbated by Musk’s many businesses.
In a March incident, former president Barack Obama criticized the plans of Silicon Valley’s “tycoons, many of whom are building spaceships” that could take humans to Mars, according to Agence France-Presse.
“But when I hear some of the people talking about plans to bring back Mars because the Earth’s environment could be so degraded that it can’t survive, I look at them like, what are you talking about?” he said at the time.
“Even after a nuclear war, Earth would be more livable than Mars, even if we didn’t do anything about it [climate change] would still have oxygen — as far as we can tell, Mars doesn’t,” Obama added.
In short, is Mars the best place to call our next home away from home?
For Musk, it’s about “fun and adventure,” as he said during the actual Mars summit in 2020.
And those willing to ignore his twisted worldview will have to put their lives on the line to see his Mars colony vision through.
“Not for the weak,” he added at the time. “It’s okay that you’re going to die. And it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be hard, but it’s going to be glorious if it goes.”
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