Dave Mosher/Business InsiderElon Musk revealed what he thinks life will be like for early colonizer of Mars.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, wants to put 1 million people on Mars.
During a Q&A at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, Musk revealed what he thinks life will be like for the colonizers of Mars.
Musk said being an early resident on Mars will be difficult and dangerous.
Elon Musk said being one of the first people to colonize Mars won’t be glamorous.
Speaking during a Q&A at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, the SpaceX founder addressed his plans to colonize Mars and what it will be like for those early pioneers on the red frontier.
“There’s already people who want to go in the beginning. There will be some for whom the excitement of exploration and the next frontier exceeds the danger,” Musk continued.
Speaking to a packed theatre in Austin, Texas, Musk said he expects SpaceX to begin making short trips back and forth to Mars in the first half of 2019. His long-term plan is to put 1 million people on the planet as a sort of Plan B society in case nuclear war wipes out the human race.
In order to “regenerate life back here on Earth,” Musk said he prefers to get the back-up civilisation on Mars operational before an event like World War III begins on Earth.
Musk’s plan to build giant reusable spaceships for colonizing the red planet is an ambitious one. He and SpaceX have yet to detail exactly how hypothetical Mars colonists will survive for months or years on end. Many people still have practical questions for the tech billionaire.
Musk instead offered some predictions for what he thinks governance on Mars might look like.
The SpaceX founder suggested his title might be “emperor,” adding that it was only a joke.
“Not everyone gets irony,” he said.
Musk said he imagines Mars will have a direct democracy instead of the system of government used in the US – a representative democracy – whereby elected officials represent a group of people. On Mars, Musk expects people will vote directly on issues.
He said that the centuries-old representative democracy made more sense during the nation’s founding, before the government could assume most people knew how to read and write.
Musk urged future colonizers to “keep laws short,” so that people can easily read and digest the bills before voting on them. He warned that long laws have “something suspicious” going on.
“If the law exceeds the word count of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ then something’s wrong,” Musk said.
The quote got a laugh from the audience and sparked speculation that Musk was taking a jab at the Republican tax bill that was passed in December 2017. The bill came in at 503 pages and ran over 1,000 pages including the related conference committee report.
Musk also recommended that laws be easier to repeal than install. Doing so would prevent arbitrary rules from accumulating and restricting freedoms over time, he said.
“The Mars Bar,” he laughed.