Life on Mars: Musk plans galactic city of million inhabitants ‘in 50 years’

A CITY on Mars with a million inhabitants could be achievable within 50 years, the entrepreneur Elon Musk said as he laid out plans to turn mankind into a multi-planetary species.

The Spacex founder warned that humans would need to venture away from Earth to avoid a “Doomsday event” and our “eventual extinction”.

But he said that a huge Martian city could be established this century, which would not just be an outpost, but a fully functioning society with “iron foundries and pizza joints”.

Musk is planning the first manned flight to Mars in 2023 and has said he wants to die on Mars, although he has stipulated “not on impact”.

In the journal New Space, the billionaire said he hoped to build a “Mars Colonial Fleet” of more than 1,000 cargo ships with 200 passengers each and materials to build homes, industrial plants and shops. He claimed that the first colonists could begin setting out in a decade, and said it would take between 40 and 100 years to populate a city. He said: “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilisation and a multi-planetary species.”

Nasa has also said it is planning to establish a Mars colony by the 2030s, al- though it plans to establish a base on the Moon and other stepping stones first, and the Mars One project, set up by a nonprofit organisation based in the Netherlands, has proposed to establish a permanent human colony there by 2027.

Martian Space Exploration Agency, Year 28,467

Ever since our space telescopes discovered the existence of tiny pink creatures clinging to dwindling areas of dry land on the Blue Planet, schemes have been spun to settle colonies of Martians there. This is simply impossible. The planet is too hostile.

For a start, gravity there crushes the swarming pink-brown creatures almost into spheres, helped by the aliens’ insistence of cramming their primitive digestive tracts with mostly poisonous carbon-based compounds. The whole planet is soggy with a universal solvent that brings cities to ruin, rots all life and regularly drowns thousands of the denizens of the Blue Planet, who suffer the delusion that they are immune to the solvent, and even stow quantities of it inside their bloated bodies. The solvent is present in liquid form because the Blue Planet is so close to the Sun. It is unsurvivably hot. Wherever the aliens make shelters to keep themselves dry from the solvent, the structures sooner or later burst into uncontrollable combustion. Their own stupidity courts disaster. They refuse to live in the nice cold white areas at the poles and all squash together in colonies perilously near the seas of solvent.

We could never live here, and of course we shall not let them come within a million miles of Mars.