The founder of SpaceX did not hide his ambitions to colonize planets in the solar system with human settlements. The fundamental principle behind the creation of your private space company was to make life multiplanetary. Musk said last year in January that he plans to send one million people to the red planet by 2050.
However, Lord Martin Rees doubted that such an undertaking would ever be possible.
The UK’s greatest astrophysicist told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai that living on Mars would not be easy due to its notoriously hostile environment.
He said: “Elon Musk’s idea of having a million people settling on Mars is a dangerous illusion.
“Living on Mars is no better than living at the South Pole or at the tip of Mount Everest.”
Mr. Musk believes that colonizing the solar system is the only way to protect human life from being wiped out by existential threats, such as asteroid collisions.
He said at an international conference in Mexico in 2016 that the alternative to the extinction of human life was “to become a space civilization and a multiplanetary species, which I hope you will agree is the right way to go”.
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“If you want to call Mars home, you need to terraform Mars, transform it to Earth.”
He added: “It is much easier to make Earth return to Earth again than to terraform Mars.”
Mr. Musk is still confident that SpaceX will land humans on Mars in 2026 and is currently developing prototypes of his rockets.