Elon Musk reports that by talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture, he wants to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it is something that we can do in our lifetime. He thinks there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is where we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. He does 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 he hopes that you would agree is the right way to go. So how do we figure out how to take us 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? Sometimes people wonder, 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 onto one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, but those are quite far out, much further from the sun. 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 the 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 as resource-rich as Mars?. It has got a 28-day day, whereas the Mars day is 24.5 hours. Mars is far better-suited ultimately to scale up to be self-sustaining.
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