This week, Elon Musk made the astonishing claim that within 30 years, a city of one million will flourish on Mars.
Now a leading scientist has warned that Musk’s plan could prove disastrous.
Professor Andrew Coates, a physicist and Mars researcher from UCL, argues that human colonists would contaminate the planet and jeopardize the search for extraterrestrial life.
He claims that humanity should only send one astronaut to Mars if we ever want to learn the truth about life in our solar system.
Speaking about the Today’s programProfessor Coates said: ‘The last thing we need to do is bring life from Earth to Mars. Robotic exploration is the way to go.”
As Elon Musk shares his plans for a city of one million on Mars by 2054, a leading scientist has warned it could be disastrous (file photo)
On October 13, SpaceX successfully landed the Super Heavy booster on its launch pad, where it was captured by a pair of mechanical arms
After the launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (pictured) claimed that humanity would soon begin colonizing Mars
Musk’s new claims about the future of human exploration on Mars come as SpaceX makes its biggest breakthrough yet.
On October 13, the company successfully landed its 71-meter-tall (242 ft) Super Heavy booster.
The booster carried a 3,000-ton rocket 40 miles into the air before detaching and guiding itself back to the launch pad, where it was lodged in the chopstick-like ‘Mechazilla’ arms.
The booster is the largest ever designed by SpaceX and is needed to launch the massive Starship spacecraft into orbit.
This success raised hopes for cheaper, more efficient space travel that could transport colonists and raw materials to Mars.
Shortly after the successful landing on X, Elon Musk claimed that a city of one million inhabitants would flourish on Mars within the next thirty years.
Musk has claimed that Starship (pictured) and Super Heavy will make it possible to send large amounts of cargo and crew to Mars
Shortly after Super Heavy landed, Musk wrote on
However, Professor Coates warns that building a human settlement on this scale would pose serious problems for scientists.
Professor Coates is part of the team developing the NASA Rosalind Franklin rover mission, which will drill beneath the surface of Mars to search for signs of microbial alien life.
By sending human explorers to the red planet, SpaceX would inevitably contaminate the surface with biological material.
This contamination would make it much more difficult for researchers like Professor Coates to detect the subtle signs of extraterrestrial life on Earth, past or present.
Professor Coates said: ‘Ultimately Elon Musk would like to take people to the moon and possibly to Mars, but I think we have to be a bit careful with the latter.
On
Scientists have warned that landing humans on Mars (pictured) will contaminate the planet with biological spores, making it impossible to detect the signs of alien life
“We have to be very careful in the way we prepare missions, doing a lot of cleaning of the technology to make sure we don’t bring life to Mars and measure that. That’s the last thing we want to do.’
Musk has often said that the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster would be critical to establishing a permanent presence on Mars.
Mars only comes close enough to Earth for interplanetary travel once every 26 months, making the window for launches extremely short.
Establishing a city on Mars would require launching millions of tons of cargo and passengers within this short time frame.
If Elon Musk uses Starship (pictured) to take hundreds of people to Mars, as he claims is possible, this will make it much more difficult to identify whether signs of life have emerged on Mars.
Musk hopes that the high capacity and reusability of Starship and Super Heavy will make this possible.
And with the successful landing of the Super Heavy booster, this bizarre goal suddenly looks more realistic.
However, scientists have warned that a mass colonization project on Mars could destroy any evidence of life on the planet.
Some researchers have even warned that the arrival of humans could wipe out the fragile life currently living on Mars.
Professor Coates said: ‘One of the stated goals is to eventually get a million people to Mars and that’s certainly where I would draw the line.’
Scientists have used rovers such as Curiosity (pictured) to study the surface of Mars. But even a single visiting human could leave behind infections that these sensitive machines would detect
Musk hopes the reusable Super Heavy boosters (pictured) will make traveling to Mars cheaper and more efficient
Professor Coates believes humans could one day walk on Mars, but numbers will have to be strictly controlled.
He said: ‘One person may ultimately be fine, but there are risks of contagion.’
However, Professor Coates does say that SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft will allow humans to return to the moon in greater numbers.
Starship, the spacecraft carried by the Super Heavy booster, is already planned as NASA’s vehicle of choice to return to the lunar surface.
During the test, SpaceX demonstrated that it could land the booster back on the launch pad. In the future, this could mean that a Super Heavy booster could be relaunched every hour and shoot thousands of tons of material towards Mars.
Elon Musk dreams of building a city on Mars that could house a million people by 2050. However, Professor Andrew Coates, a physicist from UCL, says that a single astronaut may be able to get there safely, but there is still a risk of contamination (file photo)
The space agency has said it would like to use a modified version of Starship for the Artemis missions that will land the first Americans on the moon since the Apollo era.
“The moon is absolutely no problem, we can do that,” Professor Coates said.
That’s because the moon, unlike Mars, contains none of the ingredients necessary for life – meaning there’s no risk of biological contamination.
He concludes: ‘It’s fantastic to have been able to do this with a very large rocket, it ultimately helps us get back to humans exploring the moon – which I have no problem with – but I think we should going to do. March with a lot of people and we have to worry about that.’