Elon Must has outlined exactly why he's so keen on venturing towards Mars and other planets, and his disturbing prediction for humanity's future left one Fox News anchor in shock and dismay.
It's certainly no secret that Elon Musk has a thing for Mars, as he couldn't even contain his excitement at the prospect of exploring the big red planet at the presidential inauguration.
Reaching, exploring, and eventually colonizing Mars has been one of the key goals of Musk's space agency SpaceX, and even those within NASA have outlined the difficulties of reaching the planet with our current space technology due to time.
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There are missions and experiments ongoing to prepare humans for the potential of exploring Mars, but it remains a somewhat distant possibility that has recently been given a boost through a major NASA funding restructure.
You might be wondering what all the fuss surrounding Mars is really about though, and Elon Musk himself has offered a rather terrifying reason why he believes the colonization of other planets to be essential for humanity's future.
Speaking to Fox News, Musk outlined: "One of the benefits of Mars is life insurance for life collectively. Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the Sun. The Sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need be a multi-planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated."
Certainly a horrifying vision of the future that doesn't even touch on the impending 'tipping point' of climate change brought out by the burning of fossil fuels and increased power demands - in part due to the AI boom which Musk finds himself at the center of.
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Reacting in shock, the Fox News anchor declares that they're "hearing this for the first time," and that "no one has ever told me that the Sun is going to burn Earth."
Musk points out that this is "undisputed fact," adding that there's 'nobody' that would disagree with the fact that the future of humanity involves being, as the news anchor adeptly puts it, "roasted by the Sun." There's definitely a few Flat Earthers out there that would probably find some issue with that projection though!
One thing that we have got going for us though is the fact that the Sun destroying our planet isn't going to happen any time soon, as Musk estimates that it'll still be "several hundred million years" away.
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Some remain pessimistic about the future of humans on other planets though, as one comment on YouTube illustrates: "Considering how humans behave on Earth, it won't be long before things will be the same on Mars. So it won't solve anything."
Whether it's even possible for humans to exist long-term on another planet is still up in the air, especially considering the dangerous health side effects of spending extended periods in space, but it's definitely something that has captured the attention of the space industry at large right now.