The founder of SpaceX made no secret of his ambitions to colonize planets in the solar system with human settlements. The basic principle behind the creation of his private space company was to make life multi-planetary. Musk said in January last year that he plans to send a million people to the red planet by 2050.
Lord Martin Rees, however, doubted that such an undertaking would ever be possible.
The UK’s best astrophysicist told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai that life on Mars would not be easy due to the infamous hostile environment.
He said: ‘Elon Musk’s idea of having a million people settle on Mars is a dangerous mistake.
“Living on Mars is nothing better than living on the South Pole or the tip of Mount Everest.”
Mr. Musk believes that colonizing the solar system is the only way to protect human life from destruction by existential threats such as collisions with asteroids.
He said at an international conference in Mexico in 2016 that the alternative to eradicating human lives is to become a spatial advancement and a multi-planet species, which I hope you will agree to be the right way . ‘
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“If you want to call Mars home, you have to shape Mars, change it into the earth.”
He added: “It is so much easier to get the Earth back to Earth rather than to form Mars.”
Mr. Musk is still confident that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and is currently developing prototypes of its Starship rockets.