Leave it to those pesky experts to let the air out of Elon Musk’s Mars balloon.
The Tesla CEO has big plans involving humans and the Red Planet, but the general idea is finding significant resistance in the scientific community.
Calling it a “dangerous delusion,” Britain’s chief astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees shot down the adventure during a World Government Summit panel in Dubai.
And, lest you think it’s a “some guy called ‘Lord’ hates Americans” thing, United States astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson chimed in to say Musk’s thoughts on moving human populations to Mars was “unrealistic.”
Musk had hopes for humans to inhabit Mars by 2025.
He had told an international conference in Mexico in 2016 that we can avoid extinction by becoming “a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”
A 2018 NASA-sponsored report basically said that wouldn’t be possible with today’s tech.
Musk, via Twitter, revised his thinking and now believes it’s “possible to make a self-sustaining city on Mars by 2050, if we start in five years.”
Lord Rees said: “The idea of Elon Musk to have a million people settle on Mars is a dangerous delusion. Living on Mars is no better than living on the South Pole or the tip of Mount Everest.”
And Degrasse-Tyson had a better solution than changing Mars.
“To ship a billion people to another planet to help them survive a catastrophe on Earth seems unrealistic. If you want to call Mars home, you need to terraform Mars, turn it into Earth.
“It is so much easier to make Earth return to Earth again rather than terraforming Mars.”
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