by Elon Musk is harboring a “dangerous illusion” that a colony can be established on Mars, the Astronomer Royal has warned.
Professor Lord Martin Rees, who is also co-founder of the Center for the Study of Emission Risk at the University of Cambridge, said that it would be easier to find a solution to climate change on Earth than to try to escape to another planet.
Speaking on Lord Speaker’s Corner, the House of Lords podcast, Lord Rees said travel to other planets should be left to private pioneers and not the target of national governments.
He described Musk as an “extraordinary figure” with a “quite strange personality”, but said he did not agree with his plan to build a city on Mars.
“I don’t agree with him on that. I think there might be a few crazy pioneers living on Mars, just like there are people living at the South Pole, although it’s a lot less hospitable than the South Pole,” he said.
“But the idea of mass migration to avoid Earth’s problems is a dangerous illusion, which he and some other space enthusiasts accept.
“I don’t think it’s realistic and we have to solve those problems here in the world. Dealing with climate change on Earth pales in comparison to making Mars habitable. So I don’t think we should use that as a long-term aim at all.”
In 2016, Musk announced plans to build a settlement on Mars and said he hoped to make humans a multi-plant species.
The long-term goal of his company SpaceX is to design rockets and spacecraft that can land on and take off from the surface of other planets.
The company recently successfully orbited Starship, the vessel that will return humans to the Moon and beyond.
At the latest launch, SpaceX said Starship would make many trips in the future bringing materials and equipment to Mars to start a city.
Musk has said he believes Mars could be a “backup drive” for humanity in the event of catastrophic global warming, an asteroid strike or nuclear winter, and he believes nuclear weapons could warm the planet.
Lord Rees said: “It has done a much better job than the big conglomerates that used to work for NASA to produce efficient, reusable rockets, which will make it cheaper to launch things into space and it will be more possible to get some. engineering done in space and even solar energy collected from space.
“My line on human spaceflight is that it should not be publicly funded, certainly not by government agencies because they have to be very safety conscious and therefore very expensive.
“Robots can do all the practical things, assemble large structures in space and explore the surface of Mars and all that. If people want to fly into space as an adventure, then maybe they can get support from sponsorship or billionaires.
“We know that Messrs. Musk and Bezos are spending billions on space exploration and maybe they could send the type of people, adventurers willing to accept a very high risk and therefore send much cheaper.
“So my line is that robots should do all the practical things and only people who are willing to take risks should go into space, and they should get private funding, not from the rest we.”
Lord Rees also said he was deeply concerned by the prospect of engineering a deadly virus in a laboratory through gain-of-function research that seeks to increase a pathogen’s potency.
Although he said he believes humans will survive into the 21st century, he added: “Maybe we’ll get to the stage where some biologist can, as it were, play God at the kitchen table and to make some new version of a virus, which is very big. , very dangerous.
“Covid-19 has spread throughout the world as we know it, and even worse in my opinion, there is the possibility that people with bad intentions could engineer more dangerous viruses as possible through a technique called gain function of making viruses softer and more transmissible than the natural one. vary.
“And if that can be done and that leaks out through error or design, that could create pandemics even worse than natural ones.”
He called for better regulation and surveillance of laboratory experiments.
“I think the only way we can make ourselves adequately safe against a potential mega-disaster of an engineered pandemic is by adopting more intrusive surveillance than we’ve had to adopt until this,” he said.
