ELON MUSK WRONG TO THINK WE CAN COLONIZE MARS, SAYS NOBEL LAUREATE:

Elon Musk is wrong to claim that a million people could migrate to Mars, the co-discoverer of the first exoplanet has said.

The SpaceX owner has vowed to form a self-sustaining civilisation on the Red Planet within 100 years, but Prof Michel Mayor, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, said it was a naive notion.

He advised people to “take care” of Earth because he said no other planet could provide a “lifeboat” for humankind.
Speaking at the Starmus conference, in Tenerife, Prof Mayor said: “Could one million persons migrate to Mars in the next century?

“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 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, do you really dream of going to this surface? Do you believe that really we will migrate one million persons on the next century? No.”

It’s not like Musk doesn’t think big. But if not a million, why not aim for some sort of colony there, instead of immediately declaring the notion impossible? As Clarke’s First Law states, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”