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Elon Musk recently said he plans to bring humans to Mars by 2026, seven years before NASA plans to land astronauts there.
Elon Musk, the founder of billionaire and SpaceX, said at the 2020 Mars Virtual Convention that it aims to create a city that will support Mars before a possible world war 3.
“I think it’s helpful to have the goal of creating a self-sustaining city on Mars,” he said. “This must be the goal, not just a few people or a base, but a self-sustaining city.”
Musk then said it was important to test whether the Mars colony would disappear if supplies stopped coming from Earth for any reason, even nuclear annihilation. “If so, we are not in a safe place,” he said.
“Will we be able to create a city that will support Mars before or after World War III?” Hopefully there will never be a third world war, but [the probability of creating] after it is low ”.
“We should try to make this city self-sufficient before any possible third world war,” Musk said.
He said, however, that it was just a series of probabilities facing humanity: “There is some chance we will have a huge war, a supervolcano or a comet strike – or we could self-extinguish.”
“Honestly, right now, civilization doesn’t look very strong, you know, now we look a little shaky,” he added.
The tech tycoon said that Mars is not an escape option until it has become self-sufficient, but notes that this is unlikely to happen during his lifetime.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an evacuation lifeboat if you simply move to another place where you will soon die. That doesn’t matter, “he said.
“It’s about minimizing the existential risk to civilization as a whole and having a future in which we are a space civilization and a multi-planet species,” Musk explained.
Earlier, Musk’s neighbor on the Forbes list of the best billionaires in the world, Bill Gates, explained in an interview with a video blogger what are the main threats to humanity after the COVID-19 pandemic ended. He said there were two main threats: climate change and bioterrorism, adding that humanity could increase preparedness for global pandemics to minimize the death toll.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX conducted a second high-altitude flight test of his Starship heavy-duty vehicle, which is currently one of the billionaire’s main weapons in the fight to colonize Mars.
The two high-altitude tests were, however, semi-successful, with both vehicles successfully launching, turning back, but making a heavy landing, leading to their destruction.