Elon Musk says he wants to take one million people to Mars, and claims he is working on a “game plan” to achieve just that.
The world’s richest man previously estimated that humans will land on the Red Planet in 2029.
His company SpaceX initially set their target for their first manned tripped to Mars for this year. That, however, was pushed back to 2026, and then Musk suggested 2029 on his social media platform X/Twitter.
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Musk hasn’t said much about the plans in recent months, that is until last week when he told followers on X that a “game plan” is in the works.
Replying to a post claiming SpaceX’s Starship will “take us to Mars”, Musk said: “We are mapping out a game plan to get a million people to Mars. Civilisation only passes the single-planet Great Filter when Mars can survive even if Earth supply ships stop coming.”
The Great Filter refers to the idea that a species (humanity in this case) must make it past some form of barrier to survival, i.e climate change or nuclear Armageddon.
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The concept of the Great Filter is one possible answer to the Fermi paradox, which describes the discrepancy between the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life and the likelihood of there being extra-terrestrial life somewhere in the universe.
Musk has long said humanity must become an “multi-planet species” to ensure our long-term survival. He said back in 2021: “We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.
“It’s been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That’s too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon – again, like a big permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species.”
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