Elon Musk's plan to send a million colonists to Mars by 2050 is simply not feasible, an expert has claimed.
The SpaceX founder recently re-shared his ambitions of wanting to colonise the red planet after warning that the future of humanity is at great risk.
“I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness,” Musk told Ted curator Chris Anderson in April.
He also addressed that early life on Mars will be "dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work" and said that people "might not make it back but, it’ll be glorious.”
Space journalist George Dvorsky said the tech tycoons mass colonist aim for 2050 is "ludicrous."
"My issue with all of this has to do with the stupendously unreasonable timelines under which Musk believes this will happen," he wrote for science website Gizmodo.
"Musk, I would argue, is getting way ahead of himself. NASA, by comparison, is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
"A modest human presence would follow, but very slowly and cautiously, with pioneering explorers, scientists, and possibly even some colonists, taking their first tentative baby steps on this hostile, alien world in the years and decades to follow.
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"These disparate visions of how and when Mars might get colonised are completely out of alignment.
"It’s as if Musk and NASA inhabit two different realities. And it’s not as if the truth lies somewhere in between. Someone is not just wrong; someone is catastrophically wrong, and that someone is Elon Musk."
Physicist Kevin Olsen, who analyses data for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission, told Dvorsky that it’s “fundamentally impossible to create a completely closed environment in space.”
“Setting up a colony will go far beyond the experimentation and exploration we are used to in terms of complexity, difficulty, and danger, and we need to be prepared for it to not go smoothly,” he said.
While professor Thomas Lang, from the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in San Francisco, explained many risks need to be examined such as radiation and coping with extreme isolation.
But he said even if these concerns can be addressed, “establishing a one-million-person colony on Mars” still acts as “a leap into the unknown, both in terms of engineering and social evolution."
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