The 47-year-old Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is 70 per cent sure he will live on Mars soon. Much to the relief of Tesla’s shareholders, one imagines…
The renegade tech guru told HBO’s Axios this month that he is very sure that he will take a flight on one of his own SpaceX rockets within his own lifetime.
Musk, age 47, told “Axios on HBO” that he sees a 70% chance that he’ll live to ride one of his SpaceX rockets to Mars. “I know exactly what to do,” he said. “I’m talking about moving there.”
He added that said he thinks we will see manned flights to Mars within seven years from now, costing space trippers “around a couple hundred thousand dollars.”
Mars is not a super-rich escape hatch!
He also warned that the probability of dying on Mars was going to be much higher than that of remaining on earth, noting that the SpaceX Colony was in no way a ‘get out of earth’ option for the super-rich!
“Really the ad for going to Mars would be like [Sir Ernest] Shackleton’s [supposed] ad for going to the Antarctic” Musk said.
“It’s gonna be hard. There’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space., you know, not much time for leisure. And even after doing all this, it’s a very harsh environment. So … there’s a good chance you die there.
“We think you can come back but we’re not sure. Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?”
So, there we go! The colonisation of the red planet is only a few years off, if Elon’s calculations are anything to go by.
And it’s not going be all ‘plain space sailing’ if those comments above from Musk’s latest interview on SpaceX are on the money.
Still, even if it’s not going to work as an escape hatch for billionaires, if you are willing and foolhardy enough to be amongst the first wave of SpaceX Mars colonisers, you are still going to need to find those “couple hundred thousand dollars” for the ticket out there.
To then be followed by “nonstop” work building the base. Most likely until you die out there.
Hmmmm.
Maybe we’ll wait a decade or two longer after all until we sign up for that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Mars after all….