Elon Musk has provided the world with a shocking update on the possibility of there being alien life beyond Earth.
It’s an age-old question that still remains unanswered - is there life outside of our planet?
Despite extensive efforts, experts still haven’t been able to conclusively find any evidence but many people believe extraterrestrial life could exist.
In recent years, billionaire Musk has also set his sights on the stars, with hopes for his space firm SpaceX to establish permanent bases on both the Moon and Mars.
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And now, the tech mogul has spoken out at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to give people an update on his thoughts about intelligent life possibly being out there in space.
During a conversation the billionaire had with BlackRock CEO and World Economic Forum interim chair Larry Fink, Musk joked that he is often asked whether there are aliens among us, adding: “And I’ll say that I am one. They don’t believe me.”
He continued: “The bottom line is, I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us and if that’s the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished.”
Musk has previously said that he believes SpaceX could achieve ‘self sustaining life’ on Mars in the next 20 to 30 years.
Speaking out last year, he said: “Starship is the first rocket that has the potential to make life multi-planetary, make us a multi-planet civilization for the first time in the history of Earth and that’s truly profound.”
The billionaire added: “We are going to be able to take astronauts to Mars, in fact we want to take anyone who goes to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.
“That is the long-term goal of the company, to make life multi-planetary.”
SpaceX anticipates that Starship will have the ability to travel 140 million miles to the Red Planet in a journey time of six months.
It is also hoped that it will be capable of refueling there before making the return trip.
This will be done by ‘leveraging Mars’ natural H2O and CO2 resources to refuel on the surface of Mars’.
According to the SpaceX site: “Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.
“Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.”