Elon Musk has reportedly offered his own sperm to scientists to help colonize Mars in an attempt to fulfill his lifelong goal of inhabiting the distant planet.
According to documents obtained by The New York Times, the SpaceX founder, 53, is ordering teams to create plans to design and build a Martian city and dome habitats. Employees told the Times that Musk has ordered a team to make a spacesuit fit for Mars’ inhospitable environment and a medical team to research whether humans can procreate on Mars. Musk offered his own sperm for the research, sources told the paper.
Musk has fathered 12 children already, six with first wife Justine Wilson, one of whom died in infancy; three with former girlfriend Grimes; and three with top Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis.
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In the past, Musk has said it would take between 40 and 100 years for inhabitants of Earth to colonize Mars, but SpaceX employees told the Times Musk now wants 1 million people to be living on the planet in about 20 years.
In 2022, NASA called Mars “barren and inhospitable” but said that billions of years ago, when life first emerged on Earth, “Mars could have been Earth-like as well, with a thicker atmosphere than today and oceans of liquid water.”
No human being has been to Mars, and NASA has stated it does not expect people to make it to Mars until the 2040s. But Musk seems to want to defy the estimations of some of the world’s top scientists. In May, Musk wrote on X it was “Less than 10 [years] to land people [on Mars], maybe a city in 20, but for sure in 30, civilization is secured.”
On SpaceX’s website, the company wrote that Mars 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.”
For its part, NASA says the air on Mars is not possible to breathe, meaning it is unsustainable for humans. One million people on Mars in the next 20 years is a stretch, but the Times reported that Musk has stated he wants to die on the planet.
Musk has gone as far as buying social media platform X to “test how a citizen-led government that rules consensus might work on Mars,” according to employees who spoke to the Times. The employees also told the paper Musk said “he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla.”
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great,” Musk was quoted on the SpaceX website. “And that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
Read it at New York Times
