Elon Musk’s Mars colonization dream faces reality check from Nobel laureate
The SpaceX owner has vowed to colonise Mars within 100 years
For years, Elon Musk has patronized the idea of expanding human consciousness and colonization of the Mars planet as he thinks humans of inter-planetary species.
Now Musk's plan of colonising the Red planet within 100 years has been challenged by a Nobel Prize-winning astronaut Professor Michel Mayor who co-discovered 51 Pegasi b, the very exoplanet planet found orbiting a Sun-like star.
According to the Mayor, Musk is wrong to claim that a million people could go to Mars and live there. Speaking at the Starmus conference in Tenerife, Professor said environmental conditions on the Martian planet do not support human survival.
"The pressure on Mars is something like one hundredth of the Earth's atmosphere. It's carbon dioxide, argon, but no oxygen. So it's absolutely not convenient for man."
"The mean temperature is minus 60C. The minimum temperature could be as low as 140C. You have a strong dust wind. You have cosmic radiation, and the soil is not adequate for agriculture. It's toxic, contrary to the film where he plants some salad," he added.
"So to settle there, people would have to live in pressurised structures, either domes or underground, trying to protect themselves from the cold, and radiation.”
So the Mayor questioned Musk’s dream of migrating people to Mars, “Do you believe that really we will migrate one million people in the next century? No."
According to the Nobel laureate, humans would never be able to colonize such a world as we have to keep Physics in mind. He also urged humans to take care of Earth; no other planet could provide a "lifeboat" for humankind.
