An expert has warned that Elon Musk’s plans to live on Mars will likely end in a ‘catastrophic’ mass death.
The tech mogul has had his sights set on the Red Planet for a while now, even selling off his property portfolio in a bid to fund his Mars project.
CEO of SpaceX, Musk has hopes of creating a human colony on Mars, making humanity interplanetary.
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As part of his plans, the billionaire intends to send a million people to set up a permanent home over 100 million miles away on the Red Planet by 2050.
However, one expert has some serious concerns about the outcome of this bold plan.
Biologist and author Kelly Weinersmith sat down for an interview with CNN, where she revealed her criticism of Musk’s efforts.
Speaking about her book with husband Zach Weinersmith, titled A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, Kelly said: “The more we got into it — by year two out of the four-year research process, we were like, ‘okay, there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know that we still need to figure out’.
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“And if we do this soon, it could be an ethical catastrophe.”
She continued: “No way that you could scale up to a million people on Mars without something catastrophic happening, either in terms of it turns out we can’t have babies up there, and moms and babies are dying or getting cancer.
“If you want to do this, it’s got to be the slow work of generations to build up to a point where we could be self-sustaining on Mars.”
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The expert went on to say: “Maybe in our lifetime, we’ll see people land on Mars, do some exploration and come home, that could happen, but I don’t think we’re going to have babies on Mars.”
And she isn’t the only person who has been skeptical of Musk’s plans to get humans living on Mars.
Former president Barack Obama had also shared his doubts during an event earlier in the year.
He said: “When I hear some of the people talk about the plan to colonize Mars because the Earth environment may become so degraded that it becomes unlivable, I look at them like, what are you talking about?
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“Even after a nuclear war, Earth would be more livable than Mars, even if we didn't do anything about [climate change] it would still have oxygen — as far as we can tell, Mars does not.”