By talking about the Space X Mars architecture, I want to make Mars seem possible – make it seem as though it is something we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to. Why Go Anywhere? I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go. So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city – a city that is not merely an outpost but which can become a planet in its own right, allowing us to become a truly multi-planetary species? Why Mars? Sometimes people wonder, Well, what about other places in the solar system? Why Mars? Our options for becoming a multi-planetary species within our solar system are limited. We have, in terms of nearby options, Venus, but Venus is a high-pressure – super high-pressure – hot acid bath, so that would be a tricky one. Venus is not at all like the goddess. So, it would be really difficult to make things work on Venus. Then, there is Mercury, but that is way too close to the sun. We could potentially go to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out, much further from the sun, and much harder to get to. It really only leaves us with one option if we want to become a multi-planetary civilization, and that is Mars. We could conceivably go to our moon, and I actually have nothing against going to the moon, but I think it is challenging to become multi-planetary on the moon because it is much smaller than a planet. It does not have any atmosphere. It is not resource-rich as Mars. It has got a 28-day day, whereas the Mars day is 24.5 hours. In general, Mars is far better-suited ultimately to scale up to be a self-sustaining civilization. To give some comparison between the two planets, they are remarkably close in many ways (Table 1). In fact, we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth. In effect, if we could warm Mars up, we would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. Mars is about half as far again from the sun as Earth, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bounce around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth. We just need to change the populations because currently we have seven billion people on Earth and none on Mars.
I want to make Mars seem possible – make it seem as though it is something we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go. So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city which can become a planet in its own right, allowing us to become a truly multi-planetary species? Why Mars? Our options for becoming a multi-planetary species within our solar system are limited We have Venus, but Venus is a high-pressure hot acid bath, so that would be a tricky one there is Mercury, but that is way too close to the sun. We could potentially go to one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out It really only leaves us with one option if we want to become a multi-planetary civilization, and that is Mars. To give some comparison between the two planets, they are remarkably close in many ways , we now believe that early Mars was a lot like Earth In effect, if we could warm Mars up, we would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans. Mars is about half as far again from the sun as Earth, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bounce around currently we have seven billion people on Earth and none on Mars.