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Elon Musk’s plans to create a city on Mars will likely end in horrific mass death

Elon Musk’s plans to create a city on Mars will likely end in horrific mass death

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long promised make humanity interplanetary by establishing a permanent outpost on Mars.

With the help of his space company’s giant Starship rocket, an energetic entrepreneur wants to provide…long-term survival of consciousness“by transporting a million settlers to permanent residence on the Red Planet by 2050.

But his noble plans to create a high-risk space colony more than 100 million miles from home may be doomed from the start.

As biologist and author Kelly Weinersmith and her cartoonist husband Zach Weinersmith detail in their meticulously researched 2023 book, City on Mars: Can We Populate Space, Should We Populate Space, and Have We Really Thought It Through? the planet is a terrible choice for settlement.

In fact, they predict, these efforts could quickly escalate into a protracted and extremely costly humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.

In the new interview with CNNthe pair spoke at length about their newfound skepticism.

“The more we got into it – by the second year of the four-year research process, we thought, OK, there are a lot of things we don’t know that we still need to figure out,” Kelly told the broadcaster. “And if we do this any time soon, it could be an ethical disaster.”

“There is no way we can increase the population of Mars to a million people without something catastrophic happening,” she continued, “either in terms of us not being able to have children there and mothers and children dying or getting sick.” cancer. “

“If you want to do this, it has to be a slow, generational effort to get to the point where we can be self-sufficient on Mars,” she added.

However, in the short term, the Red Planet could be a great place for “a lot of exploration,” according to Kelly.

“Maybe in our lifetime we’ll see people land on Mars, do some research and come home, that’s entirely possible, but I don’t think we’ll have babies on Mars,” she said.

Reproduction in particular could be a serious problem due to the enormous amount of cosmic radiation exposure on the planet. The effects of microgravity in space—or just 38 percent of Earth’s gravity on the surface of Mars—may also be a major complicating factor.

“We were just surprised at how many problems we thought we were able to solve,” Kelly said. CNN. “However, it turns out that we have very little data about how adults will behave, let alone how childbirth will go.”

The authors’ concerns largely echo other experts who have criticized Musk’s plans to colonize Mars.

Political, technological and ethical issues aside, this can be prohibitively expensive even for the richest person in the world.

Additionally, there are existential threats that we face on Earth, such as the environmental crisis that is currently was actively deteriorating many of Musk’s businesses.

During the March event, former President Barack Obama slammed plans “Silicon Valley tycoons, many of whom are building spaceships that could take people to Mars” as quotes Agence France Presse.

“But when I hear some people talk about a plan to colonize Mars because the Earth’s environment could become so degraded that it becomes uninhabitable, I look at them like, what are you talking about?” he said then.

“Even after a nuclear war, the Earth would be more habitable than Mars, even if we did nothing (about climate change), it would still have oxygen – as far as we can tell, Mars doesn’t,” he added Obama.

In short, is Mars really the best place to call our next home away from home?

For Musk, it’s about “excitement and adventure.” said during a virtual conference on Mars in 2020.

And those who are ready to close their eyes to it deeply distorted worldview will have to literally put their lives on the line to realize his vision of creating a colony on Mars.

“Not for the faint of heart,” he added at the time. “There’s a good chance you’ll die. And it will be hard, difficult, but it will be very cool if everything works out.”

More about Mars: NASA rover explores spider web-like patterns on Mars