Elon Musk needed to say something inspiring about why we should colonize Mars.
Instead, in a speech Tuesday to a global meeting of astronauts, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX — who has become the leading proponent of putting people on Mars — offered a gloomy motivation amid a crescendo of details about rockets, timelines and costs. Despite his own efforts to reduce the impact of global warming, we’re doomed.
History will bifurcate at some point, he said. “One path is we stay on Earth forever, but eventually there will be some Doomsday event. The alternative is to become a multiplanetary species. I hope you agree that is the right thing to do.”
What? Armageddon shouldn’t be our chief reason for setting up shop on the red planet. But Musk’s address, “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” assumed we agree with his dark vision for Mother Earth, that our planet will eventually have a career-ending moment and we will need to have worked over Mars sufficiently to make it a habitable alternative for everyone.
Musk missed a chance to do what John F. Kennedy did in his moon address in 1962 – inspire a generation to take its biggest risk ever. Silicon Valley, and the world beyond, is full of dreamers with big visions. Fear isn’t a good motivation for any of us.
That’s why Musk should have done more: he needs to get the world, and its political and financial resources, behind him to make his Mars vision a reality.
Humans have long dreamed of traveling to other planets. In his 1950 novel “The Martian Chronicles,” Ray Bradbury described the many attempts by earthlings to colonize Mars as Earth is torn apart by war. They accidentally gave the Martians chicken pox, wiped out the local population, and practically ruined the place.
Under Musk’s current predictions, SpaceX could get people to Mars by 2025, traveling on a spacecraft whose name was recently upgraded from the mundane “Mars Colonial Transporter” to the “Interplanetary Transport System,” or ITS.
Once humans arrive, they could make Mars a true home away from home by “terraforming,” figuring out a way to use Mars’ resources to transform the planet into an Earth-like place, including plants, water and the like. (Musk has suggested the quick way of terraforming would be to drop a thermonuclear bomb on Mars’ poles to increase its temperature.)
Musk talked about how to get the price for a Mars exodus down to $200,000 per trip or even lower and to shorten the time spent traveling from Earth to Mars to under 30 days. Musk said the main reason he is accumulating assets now is to fund this effort. His vision is to establish a self-sustaining colony of one million people, an effort that might take 40 to 100 years.
But why?
Fear. “What really matters is making a self-sustaining civilization on Mars as fast as possible,” he said.
Part of the issue for Musk is that he is a technical guy, not someone who easily waxes rhetorically about human potential. In a question-and-answer period after the speech, Musk conceded that point, saying it’s up to the entertainment industry to put the dream in people’s heads and ignite the collective passion for such a voyage. His job is to make it feasible.
But he did in the final moments offer another more uplifting reason than our future doom: Going to Mars will be fun.
“This is different from Apollo. This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure,” he said.
That word – adventure – could inspire a generation to lift their heads from their iPhones and dream about a celestial voyage into the future. Musk may need to adopt a little more of that approach if he wants to fulfill his dream — and ours.
