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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has declared he plan to ferry one million people on Red planet by 2050 — with his ex-girlfriend Grimes presumably being one of those colonizers.
But Martin Rees, honorable astrophysicist and part of the Royal Households of the United Kingdom under the lofty title of “Astronomer Royal,” is claiming not so quick — and claimed Elon Musk Mars plan a “dangerous illusion.”
He build his bold-face remarks for the House of Lords’ podcast Lord Speaker’s Corner, as spotted by The Telegraph, in which he also called Elon Musk an “amazing figure” who has a “rather unusual personality,” alluding to Elon Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior.
“I don’t believe it’s realistic and we’ve got to decode that issues here on Earth,” he said. “Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle as compared to making Mars suitable for habituation. So, in my opinion we should hold that out as a long-term goal at all.”
“I believe there might be a some crazy colonist living on Mars, such as people surviving at the South Pole, although it’s far less habitable than the South Pole,” he said. “But the concept of mass migration to ignore the Earth’s obstacles, which he and a few other space enthusiasts adopt, that, I guess, is a dangerous illusion.”
Rees instead suggested that any human exploration of space should be sponsored anonymously and not with public wealth, like the close partnership between NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, because governments “got to be very safety conscious and that cause it very costly,” he said.
Instead, Rees suggested remote-controlled robots do the bulk of exploration — and solid lifting of building structures out in space — while “only those humans who actually have strong guts for risk should be moving into space, and they must be privately funded, not by the rest of us.”
NASA is already exploring commercial partners, along with SpaceX, for moving to Mars, which will surely cost countless gobs of money.
These are applied points Rees has raised, because our bodies are just not equipped to withstand longterm space travel because of the low gravity and cosmic radiation, among other dangerous factors.
And in a bigger way, maybe he’s correct that we should solve the issues we’ve made here on Earth before forging out to mess up another planet.
