Elon Musk thinks that we must become a multi-planet species in order to survive, and he’s set his sights on the Red Planet as humanity’s second home.
Elon Musk thinks that we must become a multi-planet species in order to survive, and he’s set his sights on the Red Planet as humanity’s second home.
Earth is not enough. Will people call themselves Martians one day?
Mars has always held a special place in the popular imagination. As one of our closest planetary neighbors, Mars is bright enough to be seen in the night sky with the naked eye. Records of the planet go back as far as 400 B.C. – the Babylonians called Mars ‘Nergal,’ the king of conflicts, while the Egyptians dubbed it ‘Har Decher,’ or the Red One.
Unsurprisingly, there were those who thought that there might be little green men on Mars. In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli spotted what he described as “canali”, a term which was interpreted as “canals” in English, but which was really closer to “channels”. This mistranslation gave the impression that these channels were artificial, giving rise to rampant speculation about civilization on Mars.
Fast-forward to today, and we’ve entered an era where commercial space flight seems almost viable, with companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic all testing their own rockets. So when Elon Musk took to the stage at the International Astronautical Congress in September to detail his plans to turn humanity into a multi-planet species, the audience waited with bated breath.
Musk’s vision was grandiose. SpaceX’s ambitiously titled “Interplanetary Transport System” comprises a giant rocket and equally gargantuan spaceship, and Musk claims it can ferry up to 100 people to Mars in just 80 days. The first manned mission could be as soon as 2024, and he estimates that a self- sustaining colony could be up and running within the next century.
But here’s the interesting thing. Musk doesn’t want to go to Mars because he thinks of it as a brave new frontier to be conquered. He may be appealing to those whose hearts are too wild to remain earthbound, but the entire endeavor is about far more than just exploring space. Instead, Musk genuinely believes that in order to survive as a species, humanity must settle beyond Earth.
The way Musk sees it, things can only go two ways for Homo sapiens. In the first scenario, we remain on Earth until some mass extinction event wipes us out. In the second, humanity takes to the stars and learns to call somewhere else home.
By his logic, Musk sees it as a moral imperative to ensure we’re not waiting to go the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, Musk is so serious about this that he says the only reason he’s personally accumulating wealth – through his companies like Tesla and ventures in renewable energy – is to fund his ultimate goal of giving humanity a back-up plan.
Is Musk crazy? Maybe. But he’s also a radical visionary who dares to defy conventional thinking and the limits of current technology. The intrepid sailors who left the Old World didn’t know what they were going to find, but they left anyway in search of new lands. One day, Musk could be remembered as the man who literally gave all of mankind a New World.
“Records of the planet go back as far as 400 B.C. – the Babylonians called Mars ‘Nergal,’ the king of conflicts, while the Egyptians dubbed it ‘Har Decher,’ or the Red One.”
