Why struggle to make Mars a nice place to live when we can’t look after the planet we’ve already got?
Elon Musk made some rather wild promises at the International Astronautical Congress last week: his SpaceX company is going to start sending people to Mars by 2024, and in 40 to 100 years, he will have a million of us living there.
I have one big question about this. Why bother? Mars is a rotten place to live. You can’t breathe, eat, drink or go outdoors; the soil’s toxic, constant radiation streams in from space, and the average temperature is -60C. It looks rather bleak to me, but for some people I suppose the clincher would be that messages home would take 15 minutes, and “it would be hard to Skype with anybody”, according to Ashwin Vasavada of Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory.
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