A US billionaire Elon Musk, has made plans to build a settlement for 80,000 people on Mars when technology makes it possible for man to live there – as long as the inhabitants are vegetarians.
“I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that there will be a space hotel within the next ten years, in orbit around the Earth,” he said in October.
Musk plans to take it a few steps further by building a city for 80,000 space explorers. The new city would use sustainable technology and send people to space on a rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane. The billionaire’s estate and prominence in the space industry could make his plans feasible, but the California-based engineer has not left behind his personal ideologies: Musk will only allow vegetarians to live in his settlement.
“The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip,” Musk said.
While 800,000 residents may seem like a large number of people to send to Mars, Musk explained that reducing the size would cause the gene and culture pool to be too small, while the risk for civil war would be too high.
“On Mars you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big,” Musk said.
But an undertaking of that magnitude would not eliminate the dangers: space exploration comes with the threat of deep-space radiation, bone-rot and toxic dusk, which space visitors and those constructing the settlement would have to risk acquiring. Still, Musk believes his goal is within a near reach.
And Anderson concurs: the space entrepreneur believes the commercial enterprise will far surpass the works of government-funded agencies like NASA and rapidly bring settlements to other planets.
“With my work, and many others working in the private section, the mission is coming closer to reality,” Musk said.
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