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Elon Musk Says There's a '70 Percent' Chance He'll Move to Mars

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 26 2018, @10:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-forget-to-say-goodbye dept.

martyb writes:

Elon Musk Says There's a '70 Percent' Chance He'll Move to Mars:

Elon Musk has talked about personally heading to Mars before, but how likely is he to make the trip, really? Well, he just put a number on it. In an interview for the Axios on HBO documentary series, Musk said there was a "70 percent" chance he'll go to Mars. There have been a "recent number of breakthroughs" that have made it possible, he said. And as he hinted before, it'd likely be a one-way trip -- he expects to "move there."

The executive also rejected the idea that traveling to Mars could be an "escape hatch for the rich" in its current form. He noted that an ad for going to Mars would be "like Shackleton's ad for going to the Antarctic," which (though likely not real) made clear how dangerous and the South Pole journey was. Even if you make it to Mars, you'll spend all your time building the base and struggling to survive harsh conditions, Musk said. And while it might be possible to come back, it's far from guaranteed. As with climbing Everest, Musk believes it's all about the "challenge."

The interview is available on YouTube.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 27 2018, @11:42AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 27 2018, @11:42AM (#766889) Journal

    Humanity has already created far more difficult things on Earth.

    What exactly? Australia? I don't think you can compare the difficulties of Earth with either the Moon or Mars colonies. Being on Earth also means being fairly close to some army of some kind that could put a stop to you. Not so easily said or done on the Moon, much less Mars. I think you should read the book I mentioned. One of my favorites from Heinlen.

    How about a seven billion person civilization which just happens to include Australia (and really, Australia isn't a bad comparison in its own right).

    What would really "shoot" the nukes down is a large field of small rocks created by smashing together asteroids. Could that nuke fly through the rings of Saturn without injury? I'm not saying it is guaranteed or anything, but I seriously doubt Earth has nuke delivery technology that can sense and evade rock particles sized between a screw and a baseball.

    The answer is yes, that nuke could fly through the rings of Saturn without injury - we had a wimpy space probe pass through the rings 22 times [nasa.gov] before entering Saturn's atmosphere (the Cassini probe). And current warheads are pretty solid. I believe they could take hits from screw-sized objects going about 2-3 km/s (which is what objects in orbit would be going vs an object coming in at 1.7 km or so). Finally, that's a lot of matter to throw up. You're trying to put enough matter up that the warhead is disabled more than 50% of the time on a single pass through the debris belt. Sorry, that's much harder than you think. It's one thing to take out satellites that have an effective path of millions of kilometers in length. It's another to tag the space craft on its one-way trip in (at best you have a transit path of hundreds of km).