Elon Musk: We need to go to Mars as soon possible to survive the Apocalypse on Earth
That Mars is suited for human habitation is a well documented fact. In fact, out of the billions and billions of planets in our home galaxy, Mars seems to be the nearest and most obvious choice for future space settlement.
However, Elon Musk has other reasons for colonizing Mars. As per scientists, Earth has seen five mass extinctions throughout its history, due to cataclysmic disasters like giant asteroids and massive volcanic eruptions. Billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla owner, Elon Musk thinks it is now time for next apocalypse.
In fact, he is so concerned that he thinks we need to get off Earth as soon as possible and colonize Mars on immediately according Tim Urban. Urban has written a analytical post How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars dedicated to why Musk wants to colonize Mars.
According to Urban, Musk’s reasoning is simple and straightforward. By the time Earth is faced with a probable crash with a giant asteroid, we’ll possibly have the technology to shield the planet or redirect the space rock with some sort of nuclear weapon. But what happens if there is a more catastrophic event like a nearby star exploding which could possibly vaporise Earth. Musk says we can’t afford to wait around and find out.
In his blog post, Urban gives us another way to think about it: Imagine Earth as a hard drive, and every species is a word document saved on that hard drive. The hard drive has already crashed five times (those five mass extinctions), and each time it loses a huge chunk of those documents (species going extinct). So you can think of the human species as an incredibly valuable document created on that hard drive:
Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do? You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.
This is the reason why Musk is in a hurry to colonize Mar’s, it could become humanity’s backup drive. For that purpose, a few people on Mars wont do, he’d wants to settle a million Earthlings on the red planet.
