It’s no secret that Tesla’s rocket man has been considering conquering Mars for some time, but the space community thinks he’s nuts for it.
When Valuetainment interviewed David Kipping, the Assistant Professor, Department of Astronomy at Columbia University, it got hella juicy and viewers learned all about the challenges of living on Mars.
That’s because when Elon Musk’s six-month plan to colonize Mars was brought up, his plans were foiled by some very real issues that space is having right now.
While some could think that all you must do is grab a group of people, move to Mars and start life from scratch, there’s far more at play.
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When Kipping was asked his opinion on Musk’s decision to get into searching for another habitat, he was honest.
He explained: “Yeah, some of my colleague’s kind of think it's ridiculous and think it's just totally crazy that we'll ever do this.”
However, he doesn’t have any hard feelings about Musk wanting to pour his fortune into his efforts.
Continuing, he explained: “I've always felt like it was if someone wanted to spend their own money to try and do it like, all power to them let them, try and do it.
“I get the philosophy. The philosophy is, as long as we're all on planet Earth we're at risk because all it takes is one giant meteor or one nuclear war or whatever cataclysm you want, and we're all gone.”
This type of fear of death is something that the astronomer understands can make people want to create a new world to survive on.
He said: “So, if your objective is to preserve the species then it totally makes sense that you would want to have a second base and whether that base be on the moon or Mars, I don't really have a strong opinion.”
However, if Musk really wants to go to Mars, there are some challenges he’ll face.
Kipping said:” I think there are definitely advantages on Mars because it's a higher surface gravity it does appear to have a bit more water the temperatures. There is some atmosphere at least, whereas the moon has no atmosphere at all, but it's further away so that's another challenge and how do you actually get there in the first place?
“How do you actually service it and have infrastructure go back and forth? But I think it's a cool goal.”
Noting that he has no desire to live on Mars, considering it to be a worse environment than Antarctica, the expert shared that there’s only a certain group of people who are fit for carrying on with human survival elsewhere in the galaxy.
He said: “I think if you put out a call for astronauts for Mars there'd be no shortage of volunteers who'd be willing to end their life on Mars, if that's what it took to go there.
“You need people like that to push the envelope, I just don't want to do it myself and that's where it's like you have to divorce maybe how you feel about something versus someone else putting their life at risk.”