Intended as a joke but ominous just the same, Elon Musk once told Mark Cuban he wanted more kids to populate Mars. You can imagine little ten-year-old Elon with a National Geographic map of Mars pinned to his wall, plotting out his colonization of the red planet back in the early 1980s. He's been singularly obsessed with this vision ever since.
I suppose he eventually read Frank Herbert's Dune series, imagining himself as Paul Atreides. Arrakis felt a lot like Mars. The planet became very popular in the 60s with the first probe in 1964. We were finally able to get images and it looked a lot like our rocky deserts here on earth. NASA captured more images with its orbiters in 1971, resulting in the NG Mars map that came out in 1973. Subsequent rover missions in 1975 and 1976 resulted in the first terrestrial images with much speculation over the seeming human face and what were initially believed to be pyramids on the red planet.
The idea of colonizing Mars became the dream of many. The Soviet Union was also sending orbiters to Mars but not having much luck landing a spacecraft on the planet. In recent years, China has also sent orbiters to Mars. So, you can say the planet is hot property. The only problem is getting enough space craft there with massive payloads to create anything approximating a space outpost, much less a colony. All though, you have to hand it to Ridley Scott for making it seem entirely doable.
If countries were able to get together and share technology and resources they might actually be able to pull something like this off, but on a very small scale. Musk doesn't think small. He imagines terraforming the planet, which is easier said than done. There hasn't been running water on Mars in over 3 billion years. Even if you could get enough water from condensation tanks, you would still have to live largely in hermetically sealed environments, as the planet has extreme temperature variations. It is after all 180 million kilometers further away from the sun and has a very thin atmosphere.
It may at one time been much like earth as the planet does appear to have once been covered in water. Ice caps still exist. Any form of previous life would most likely be encased here. However, unless you can find a way to tap into the underground reserves, as the giant sand worms did on Arrakis, there isn't much hope for any sustained form of living on the planet. Of course, that was probably what the Vikings said about Greenland, so who knows what we might uncover in the near future.
Safe to say Elon won't be around anymore, but his offspring probably will be. He's fathered at least 10 kids from three women. Sometimes they came in bunches, like the triplets and twins he had with his first wife Justine as the result of fertility methods. He was really determined to have progeny after the loss of his firstborn Nevada to SIDS. I well imagine it is his hope that his kids will carry forth his intergalactic mission into the next generations.
However, the reality of the situation is that any colonization of distant planets will most likely be with robots as you don't have to feed or nurture them. With Artificial Intelligence they will even be able to repair themselves and possibly create their own progeny so that there is no need for humans. We are the product of our own planet after billions of years of evolution. Whatever hope for our long term survival rests here on Earth. Let's just hope we don't end up like Mars.
It is much more fascinating to see the images the new Webb telescope is sending back, providing us glimpses of a vast universe with galaxy nurseries like Carina Nebula. This will allow for even greater galactic mapmaking that will no doubt inspire future generations.
But herein lies an interesting paradox. We aren't seeing into the future. We are seeing into the past. With the new Webb telescope, we could potentially see 14 billion light years into the past to the origins of the universe. Whatever we are seeing has already happened and we are just getting a light image that has traveled countless years through space.
This to me is what makes astronomy so fascinating, not one man's perverse vision to colonize a distant planet in the name of his children.
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