Fresh from a successful mission to save NASA astronauts who were stranded at the space station on Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicted that people will live on Mars within 20 years during a podcast with Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
“You need Mars to become self-sufficient and be able to grow automatically before the supplying of Earth Stop-Stop,” said Musk posted in the podcast on Wednesday. “That is the critical civilization threshold above which the likely lifespan of civilization is much greater.”
Although Musk believes that 20 years is a realistic time frame for a Mars colony for flourishing, it would require enormous means, a large population and a habitat that is capable of preserving life in the thin atmosphere of Mars and extreme temperatures.
“A few people who run around the surface of a hostile environment will not make it self -sufficient,” said Musk. “You will need the order of a million people and a million tons of freight.”
Setting up a self-sufficient colony on Mars, said Musk, is not just about sending people-it is about rebuilding the fundamental systems that support civilization.
On the planet Earth: “We are at the top of an enormous pyramid of the industry that starts with mining a wide range of materials, which run through hundreds of refinement steps,” he said. “We grow food, trees and make things of them. You have to build all of that on Mars, which is a hostile environment.”
On Friday, Musk said That SpaceX is planning to launch a spaceship to Mars in 2026, with Tesla Optimus Robots. If everything goes well with that mission, people are expected to launch to Mars in 2029.
Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, Musk has given priority to colonizing the red planet. He even promised to donate his sperm to “sow a colony”, according to one New York Times Report that did not mention the aforementioned sources.
To build up excitement for the mission to Mars, SpaceX launched a March Madness promotion last week, where the perfect winner of the bracket could win a trip to Mars on a SpaceX room ship.
Despite his optimism, skeptics claim that Musk’s vision of a “self -sufficient colony” on Mars is unrealistic, misleading and a promotional stunt.
“The only way to achieve that is to go underground. Mars is uninhabitable due to extreme radiation”, journalist and podcast -guestheer Jim Stewartson written On X. “It is a bare, frozen and worthless rock, 140 million miles away. This is nothing more than a hoax to steal your money.”
But in his interview with Cruz, Musk claimed that Mars is a stepping stone to understand the universe.
“I have a philosophy of curiosity. I want to understand the universe that other planets, star systems and galaxies require,” said Musk. “We can find alien civilizations or their remains, gain insight into where the universe is going, where it came from and the questions we still have to ask about the universe.”
SpaceX was dealing with various setbacks in his search for Mars in January, including losing one of his spaceship spacecraft over the Turks and Caicos in January due to a malfunction during the flight that the company called a “fast unplanned disassembly”.
Musk’s designs on Mars are probably dependent on his constant good relationship with US President Donald Trump, who said during his inauguration speech in January that going to Mars was part of the ‘manifest fate’ of America.
On Tuesday, the Russian Special Envoy Kirill Dmitriev said the Kremlin wants to collaborate with Musk to strengthen his space agency, Roscosmos, Reuters reported.
“I think there will undoubtedly be a discussion with Musk in the near future,” Dmitriev said to say during a recent conference in Moscow.
Published by Andrew Hayward
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