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In each of its job offers, SpaceX says it's pursuing "the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars."
To this end, his website hosts the image of a rusty red planet turning into a world similar to the Earth. The illustration is a nod to a hypothetical and speculative process called terraforming.
Terraforming is a type of climate change, but deliberate and faster than the current process on Earth.
The idea is that Mars could be turned into a hot and humid world, better suited to permanent human colonization, if we could melt the planet's carbon dioxide-rich icecaps.
In its current state, Mars has less than 1% of the atmospheric density at its surface relative to the Earth. (Billions of years ago, most of Mars' air was blown into space.) This makes it comparable to a vacuum chamber. Under these conditions, harmful space radiation is not blocked and no one can breathe on the outside of a space suit or sealed colony.
It is not known if terraforming could be carried out sustainably on Mars. NASA doubts that this is possible, because it is possible that the gases trapped in the poles are not enough to feed a pleasant planetary atmosphere.
In addition, the effort may require a kind of powerful satellite that can generate a magnetic shield to protect against solar radiation that would otherwise project any man-made atmosphere.
On the other hand, the scenarios studied by the researchers do not really take into account water or methane (a potent greenhouse gas) likely to be trapped in Martian soil. They also do not study whether comets and chemical-rich asteroids could be redirected to hit Mars. Musk even said that neutralizing Mars could help.
Experimenting with terraforming may only be one way to tell if it is possible. Musk, or perhaps its memory and heritage, may well be the momentum that makes it possible in the distant future.
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