Elon Musk's plan to 'colonise Mars' takes huge step forward as scientists say we're closer to major change
If humanity ever wants to make it off our planet and reach the furthest stars then we're going to have to learn how to live on other planets.
Sadly, there aren't many worlds with that special mix of factors that makes Earth so darn liveable, so we are likely going to have to make the best of it and not be so picky.
That means terraforming (I'll explain later) is on the table and the closest planet we can practice on is our neighbour in the solar system, Mars.
We can land probes and rovers on Mars, though several decades on from landing a man on the moon we're still yet to get someone to set foot upon that red surface.
Advert
That's not to say there aren't plans, Elon Musk has said he wants to 'colonise Mars' within the next few decades and the idea of having a permanent settlement on another planet may have been given a boost by a new study, which goes over the technology we need and the moves we ought to make.
What is Musk's plan for Mars?
The Tesla boss wants to colonise Mars by sending a million humans to the red planet in a fleet of 1,000 Starships by 2050, so that's going to be 40,000 people a year for the next 25 years or slightly more than 100 a day.
Only it's going to have to be at a much higher rate than that because he doesn't currently have a SpaceX craft which can get to Mars.
His Starship range is currently undergoing tests and they're not going well as they all keep crashing and exploding. Despite returning to the drawing board time and time again, Musk predicts that he can launch a Starship mission to Mars by the end of 2026, which would land on the planet several months later in 2027.
Oh yes, that's another problem with getting to Mars, it's quite a long way away and our current ships will take between seven and nine months to reach it, and that's in a rare window of opportunity where our planets are close together - which won't be present for another couple of years if SpaceX can't launch on time.
Anyone making the journey to colonise the planet better pack a good book for the journey.
Musk said: "Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus.
"If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely."
Optimus, by the way, is Musk's humanoid robot.
He hopes that one day he will be able to launch three Starships a day at a regular rate so anyone can go to Mars, where presumably there would be somewhere for them to live and they would have 'lots of jobs' to do.
What is terraforming?
Terraforming is the process, currently hypothetical at the point, where through science and technology we'd make a planet's environment more like Earth so it was capable of supporting our life there.
As a general rule, humans can survive about three minutes without air, which is a problem considering the Martian atmosphere has nowhere near enough oxygen for you or I to be anything but very much dead.
Other aspects that would need changing for terraforming are the planet's temperature and the the ground itself, as Mars is some way further from the sun and has an average surface temperature of -60°C.
We'd need to make conditions in the spot of Mars we wanted to live resemble those on Earth, and terraforming is the way to do that.
What's the reality of this happening?
According to Space, a new paper is suggesting it's time to take terraforming more seriously.
Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs and lead author of the study, said that 30 years ago the idea of terraforming Mars was 'impossible', but developments in technology such as the SpaceX Starship and 'synthetic biology' mean it's now more possible than ever.
That's not to say that it's easy, Starship does keep exploding after all, but the team of scientists think it's within our reach to terraform Mars.
Professor Edwin Kite, study co-author, said: "We now know that Mars was habitable in the past, from data returned by the Mars rovers, so greening Mars could be viewed as the ultimate environmental restoration challenge."
However, it's best not to get too carried away at this point as the experts reckon that a full terraforming of Mars would take centuries or even millennia.
If we're going to colonise Mars, we'd need to start somewhere, so there might need to be some focus on just making a little bit of it habitable at first before trying to turn the entire red planet into a green and pleasant land.
Technological advancements have come a long way, but the study authors have stressed that the technology to terraform Mars is not all currently available.
One of the main hurdles would be warming up Mars until it was at a point where the temperature was high enough to support liquid water and the growth of oxygen-producing microbes.
We'd then have to introduce these microbes to Mars so they slowly produced organic matter and oxygen, which is needed to sustain human life.
Finally, we'd have to build the complicated sort of biosphere that could support developed plant life and allow humans to breathe normally.
We are still a long way off making that a reality, but perhaps soon we'll have the craft to get there.
Joe Harker