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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has some ambitious plans to transform humanity into a multiplanetary species.
With the help of a fleet of Starship spaceships, the intrepid billionaire wants to establish a permanent foothold on Mars, one million strong, by 2050.
Now, Musk is publicly enriching his vision even further.
“At the beginning, life in glass domes” Musk wrote in a tweet on Thursday, answering a question about what life on Mars will be like early on. “Eventually terraformed to support life, like Earth.”
Scientists and science fiction writers have long suggested that terraforming could allow humans to breathe on the open Martian surface. But that vision is still a distant dream, well beyond early Martian bases, according to Musk.
“Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our life,” Musk wrote in a follow-up tweet. “However, we can establish a human base there in the course of our life. At least one future space-traveling civilization – discovering our ruins – will be impressed by humans who have come this far. “
Terraforming Mars is truly a huge undertaking. An analysis last year concluded that 3,500 nuclear warheads may be needed each day to raise Mars’ atmospheric pressure to breathable levels and melt the planet’s polar ice caps to release carbon dioxide, which will then be trapped in the form of greenhouse gases.
But there is a big problem with that plan. The resulting radiation would also make the surface completely habitable.
And a 2018 study also concluded that there simply isn’t enough trapped carbon dioxide on the Red Planet to raise the atmospheric pressure enough to support humans on the surface.
But these limitations won’t stop Musk from pursuing his dream of establishing a permanent presence there.
Musk has already said that with the help of “a thousand” Starship spaceships, massive rockets that he believes will be capable of carrying up to 100 tons of cargo or 100 passengers between planets, “a sustainable city on Mars” could be created. According to Musk’s calculations, about 100 vehicles should each carry 100 tons of cargo every two years.
Early settlements might look a bit rough around the edges.
“Getting to Mars, I think, is not the key issue,” he said at a Humans to Mars virtual summit in September. “The key issue is building a base, building a city on Mars that is self-sufficient.”
“I want to emphasize, this is a very difficult and dangerous and difficult thing,” he added at the time. “Not for the faint of heart. There is a good chance you will die. And it’s going to be tough, tough, but it’s going to be pretty glorious if it works. “
Ambition is very close to the entrepreneur’s heart, or at least to his marketing strategy.
“If we don’t improve our pace of progress, I will surely be dead before I go to Mars,” Musk said at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington in March.
His space company has come a long way to make Starship a reality. Several early prototypes have already taken flight, albeit only at a height of around 500 feet. In the following weeks, the first prototype will attempt to fly at an altitude of nine miles.
If all goes according to Musk’s ambitious plan, the first spaceship will arrive on Mars as early as 2024.
READ MORE: Terraform Mars: Elon Musk says a Mars city of “glass domes” comes first [Inverse]
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