Werner Herzog: Elon Musk’s city on Mars is a “mistake” and an “obscenity”

Elon Musk is on a mission to make humans a multi-planetary species by building an independent city on Mars.

The billionaire tech mogul said the Starship spacecraft designed by his missile company, SpaceX, could be launched on its first flight to Mars as early as 2024. Eventually, he hopes the rocket will transport people to the red planet in mass. His goal is to build a city of 1 million Martians by 2050.

Legendary director Werner Herzog thinks it would be “a mistake”.

“I think Elon Musk calls himself some kind of tech visionary,” Herzog told Inverse. “Because he has to sell his electric cars. It’s wonderful that he does. He has to sell his reusable rockets. It’s wonderful that he does.”

But, he added, “I disagree with him when he postulates and preaches about the colonization of Mars”.

Humans “shouldn’t be like locusts,” Herzog said, but instead they should “try to keep our planet habitable.”

Musk stated that the Earth cannot be habitable forever and that the human species should survive it. If the climate crisis doesn’t make our planet inhospitable to human life, an asteroid impact could easily do so. Even if we are lucky, in a few billion years the rising sun will boil from the oceans of the Earth and, eventually, expand to completely engulf our planet.

For Musk, colonizing Mars is the first step in escaping this fate. But Herzog told Inverse he isn’t convinced.

“I have to tell not only Elon Musk, but everyone,” he said. “It’s obscenity. The very thought is obscenity.”

He compared the entrepreneur’s plans to the rise and fall of communism and fascism in the 20th century.

“Thank God, both of these gigantic utopias have been accomplished,” he said, adding that the same will happen to the Martian city of Musk. “Our century will very quickly bring to an end the technological utopia like the colonization of Mars.”

However, Herzog said he “would like to go [to Mars] with a camera with scientists. “