It’s no secret that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants humanity to move to Mars. His ambitions over the years have ranged from cutting down carbon emissions to sending people in a rocket to Mars to set up houses in case a major catastrophe were to hit Earth. While the former has been achieved more or less with Tesla, the latter is getting closer to reality with SpaceX. Musk at SXSW said that Mars spaceships will likely be ready for short flights by early next year.
Continuing last year’s plans to colonise Mars, Musk at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, explained that things will be dangerous for people who go to Mars. However, “There’s already people who want to go in the beginning. There will be some for whom the excitement of exploration and the next frontier exceeds the danger,” he added. Musk expects that SpaceX will be ready to make short trips back and forth to Mars by the first half on next year.
His long-term plan, however, is to put 1 million people on the planet in case a nuclear war wipes out humanity. As doom and gloom as that sounds, Musk has reasons to believe that humanity on earth could be facing an eventual doomsday scenario, whether it is in the form of a third world war or whether artificial intelligence takes over. Whatever be the case the SpaceX CEO strongly believes there is a need to colonise Mars and maybe even the Moon. But Mars comes first.
“There’s likely to be another dark ages… particularly if there’s a third world war,” Musk said during the Q&A. In the short-term, once the company is ready with a spaceship that is capable of making short trips to Mars, Musk adds that entrepreneurial resources will be needed to build an entire base of industry that allows human civilisation to exist.
A colony on Mars would carry forward the human culture by staying away from whatever eventual doom is in store for Earth. Musk adds that the only way to ensure that the dark ages are shortened is by having humans on other planets who can come back to Earth and rebuild.
One of Musk’s biggest fears is the advancements of artificial intelligence and he uses the example of Googles Alpha Go AI which managed to beat Go champions like Lee Sedol and Ke Jie only to lose to an even better AI called Alpha Zero 100 games to zero. Mark my words, Musk said, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? If AI doesn’t wipe us out then a nuclear war could and that is the other reason why Musk feels colonising the Solar System is needed.
Towards the end, Musk urged that future colonisers should keep laws short so that people find them easier to read and digest. He feels that long laws are suspicious and laws in general should be easier to repeal. “If the law exceeds the word count of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ then something’s wrong,” Musk said.
Source: India Today
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