SpaceX workers are preparing to build a Martian city. One team is designing small, dome-protected residential buildings and studying the materials that could be used to build them. Another is creating spacesuits to combat hostile environments, and a group of medical scientists is trying to determine whether humans can bear children on Mars.
All of these initiatives are still in their infancy, but they indicate that the timeline of the plan is changing.
In 2016, Musk said it would take 40 to 100 years for a self-sustaining civilization to emerge on the planet, but in April 2024 he told SpaceX employees that he now expects 1 million people to live on the planet in about 20 years.
"There is a need to make life multiplanetary," he said. "We croatia phone number material have to do it while civilization is this strong."
Musk has long been trying to challenge the impossible, and he often succeeds. But the idea of living on Mars takes his seemingly boundless ambitions to the extreme — and some might say, to the absurd. No human has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t plan to send humans to Mars until the 2040s. And if humans do get there, they’ll be greeted by barren terrain, freezing temperatures, dust storms, and unbreathable air.
Yet he is so committed to the idea of establishing a civilization on Mars — he once said he planned to die there — that it has become the driving force behind almost all of his business initiatives on Earth. According to sources, every one of the companies he runs or owns could potentially contribute to the creation of an extraterrestrial colony:
The Boring Company was created, among other things, to prepare equipment for tunneling beneath the surface of Mars.
Musk said he bought X, a social media platform, in part to test how a citizen-led government with consensus-based decision-making could work on Mars.
He also said that, in his opinion, the inhabitants of the planet will drive Cybertrucks, which are manufactured by his car company Tesla.
Musk, whose net worth is estimated at $270 billion, has publicly stated that he is accumulating assets — including a $47 billion compensation package from Tesla — to fund his plan to explore Mars.
