Attendance is not mandatory here. It’ll be dangerous and people might die.
Few people will want to go to Mars in the beginning. But for some, the excitement of the frontier exceeds the concern of danger.952 I think it would be the adventure—the best adventure one could possibly go on—to go build a new civilization on a new planet.953
Some people seem to think this will be an escape hatch, some luxury resort for rich people. It is not. It’s a high probability of death relative to Earth. Long journey. Not great food. A lot of hard work.954
You have to spend six months on a rocket with a hundred other people. It will be cramped. Like old ocean voyages, six months packed on a little ship in the middle of the ocean.955
It’s going to take a while to build a real civilization on Mars. The critical threshold is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the Mars City die out or not? That’s a high bar. You can’t be missing anything.956
Imagine you’re on a long sea voyage and the only thing you’re missing is vitamin C. It’s only a matter of time before it’s curtains. You’ve got to have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars, including about a million people.957
I would like to die on Mars…just not on impact.958
Some Starships could come back to Earth. We want to offer an option of coming back, but most people who go to Mars will probably never come back to Earth.959
Most of the ships we send will probably stay there, especially while colonizing Mars, because the ship itself will be so valuable there. Martians will take apart the ship and use it for raw materials.960
Once we get to Mars, there will be a lot to do, and it’ll take a while to build it all. We have to build out the industrial base, then the city. First, we build a giant solar panel farm to generate energy. Then a facility to make fuel, oxygen to grow plants for food, and everything necessary to support life.961
Ultimately we’ll need all these things: power generation, ice mining, mining in general, propellent production, long-duration life support, construction, and global communication.962
A fuel plant will create the fuel for the return trips of many Starships. It’s mostly going to be oxygen plants, because rockets run on 78 percent liquid oxygen, 22 percent fuel. Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and water ice, which is CO2 plus H2O, so plenty of raw material to make what rockets need: CH4 (methane) and O22 (oxygen). Rocket fuel is easy to create on Mars, and in many other parts of the solar system.963
In the beginning, people would live in glass domes. Over time, we’d terraform Mars and make it like Earth.964
Mars is cold, but if we warm it up we’ll get liquid water. Mars would have an ocean roughly a mile deep on 40 percent of the planet once we warm it up. That’s a lot of water. A lot of the ice you see on the poles is actually dry ice. It’s frozen CO2.965
Terraforming Mars mostly consists of warming it up. We could warm it up either with solar reflectors in orbit or a lot of thermonuclear explosions.966
It sounds crazy, but a series of thermonuclear explosions basically creates an artificial sun. If you’re worried that it will generate dangerous radiation, have you stood in the sun? The sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor. Obviously we can stand in front of the sun and not die. We could launch a missile every ten seconds or so. It would be like gigantic thermonuclear fireworks967
We’d create two little suns, pulsing above the north and south poles.
That would warm the poles up enough that the frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) would gasify. The Martian atmosphere would get more dense, with water vapor and CO2 in the air. In Mars’s case, more CO2 in the air is good, because it will create a positive cycle to make it warmer with more liquid water—like Earth’s environment.968
Even if you don’t go to Mars, you can watch this all happen on TV. It’ll be so cool.969
What I’m describing may sound crazy, but it is a small fraction of what will ultimately be done, as long as we become a two-planet civilization. Look at the history of shipping technology in Europe. When all you had to do was cross the Mediterranean, the ships were pretty lame—they only had short-range vessels, which couldn’t cross the Atlantic.
Without the forcing function of long-range commerce, shipping technology didn’t improve much. You could do mostly the same things with ships around the time of Julius Caesar and the time of Columbus. Fifteen hundred years later, ships could still only cross the Mediterranean. But as soon as there was a reason to cross the Atlantic, shipping technology improved dramatically. The American colonies were needed for that to happen.970
Reusable rockets are the modern-day equivalent of the first ships that could cross oceans.
Until you have a breakthrough technology enabling travel, there’s no way for entrepreneurial energy to do anything.
Once we build reusable rockets, suddenly the opportunity is immense. We’re going to do our best to get you to Mars, and make sure there’s an environment there where entrepreneurs can continue building and flourish.971
The same thing happened with the first cross-continental railroad in the United States, the Union Pacific Railroad. When they were building the Union Pacific Railroad, nobody could predict Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or California becoming the most populous state in the country. That would have sounded crazy. But then they discovered gold.972
It’s incumbent on SpaceX and other organizations to figure out how to get to Mars. Otherwise, nothing else matters.
Once we get there, there’s a lot that can be done.973
There will be a lot of super exciting things that are hard to predict. After the basic infrastructure is built on Mars, there will be an explosion of opportunity for entrepreneurs, because our new world will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints. This includes everything you can imagine, like starting the first Italian restaurant on Mars. That would be cool, and somebody’s gotta do it.974