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The first human colony on Mars will be built using “glass domes,” according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
The billionaire entrepreneur, who this week became the third richest person in the world, has frequently spoken of his ambition to travel to Mars during his lifetime and transform humanity into a multi-planetary species.
The first settlers will live in temporary habitats before a more radical solution is sought to make the planet more accessible, he tweeted Thursday.
Mr Musk also said he hopes to populate Mars with one million people by 2050.
In order to make the planet more habitable, Mr. Musk is a supporter of a process known as terraforming. It involves blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons at its poles to melt the ice caps and induce accelerated warming for humans to live there.
“Life in the early glass domes. Eventually terraformed to support life, like Earth, ”he tweeted.
“Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our life. However, we can establish a human basis for them in our life. At least one future space civilization – discovering our ruins – will be impressed by humans. “
Mr. Musk first proposed terraforming as a viable way to speed up the habitability of Mars in 2014, when he described it as a “superior fixer of a planet” in an interview with the host of American television Stephen Colbert.
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“Ultimately, you can turn Mars into an Earth-like planet,” he said. “There is a fast way and a slow way. The quickest way is to drop the thermonucular weapons over the poles.”
His hope of transforming Mars was dealt a blow last year when a study published in Nature astronomy asserted that “the terraforming of Mars is not possible with current technology”.
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Still, he doesn’t seem disheartened, with his Twitter profile currently displaying a banner image of the terraforming process. SpaceX also offers a T-shirt with the slogan “Nuke Mars” in its online store.
SpaceX has also prioritized the development of its Starship spacecraft to Mars, which is being built to carry up to 100 people around the solar system.
Earlier this year, Mr Musk said Starship was the company’s “top priority”, writing in a company-wide email that progress needed to accelerate “dramatically and immediately” in order achieve the ambitious goal of sending the first humans to Mars before 2030..
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