As my regular readers know I am more than a little into sci-fi and write it regularly. As a result colonization of other planets is something a sci-fi author must grapple with whether their characters are colonizing a planet themselves, or are part of an already colonized world. Part of colonizing is Terraforming to some extent though as all known planets are not habitable to us as they are.
Over the years I have more than halfway watched our real to life potential Bond villain with some interest. Love him or hate him Mr. Musk is not exactly an idiot nor is he a bumbling fool. He has flat out said he wants to begin colonizing Mars in 2029. What a lot of people fail to realize is the process has already started and I am not referring to the spacecraft called Starship although it is an obvious component. No, I am referring to his other projects.
As many are aware we know of no fossil fuels on our diminutive red neighbor so either we bring a lot of volatile fuel 140 million miles/225 million kilometers/ 12 light minutes or we find other power sources.
You may notice Tesla Solar does not mess with wind power, that’s because the atmosphere on Mars is too thin to turn the rotors. (If you get into the contracts for them you also find the system has to have internet and it communicates in real-time with Tesla servers for “system monitoring” read "performance updates and monitoring for improvements”.) However there is plenty of sunlight, so solar tiles and powerwalls it is. With solar power you get electricity so you need electric vehicles hence Tesla Motors.
Tesla has worked their way up from small electric vehicles toward semi trucks for a reason, testing the products on Earth and getting the flaws out before shipping them 12 light minutes away. Was sending a Tesla roadster into space vanity or was it a test of its assembly and electronics? I know, how would you land vehicles on Mars? Well the U.S. Army can air drop a battle tank, so I think that answer is obvious.
Now we have Tesla tiny homes, this is another precursor toward colonization since they could basically be shipped prefab, and again airdrop them close to their final site.
Space-X is his obvious launch platform and it makes total sense that it was his first to pay a lot of attention to on that note.
Now we have Optimus robots, what better way to set up a colony with no labor force than to ship a bunch of semiautonomous robots there first.
Even The Boring Company makes sense as with a limited atmosphere it makes sense to bury your colony to deal with cosmic radiation.
Starlink is obvious as how would you transport that much fiber optic cable or wire to Mars? So satellite internet makes sense. All the habitats, robots, and other equipment need to communicate with Earth and each other. Once people are on Mars then it already is in place for them to communicate. Another bonus is you eliminate the issues with loss of signal caused by Mars rotating.
So we have power, housing, transportation, radiation protection, communication, and initial labor, so what do I see next? To me the next two logical steps are:
Heavy equipment possibly powered by site generated rocket fuel or maybe solar but let’s face facts solar does not seem like it would be the best option for heavy equipment power.
Gardening Now this already exists obviously and Andy Weir has even tackled it in The Martian, but we have to look at large scale as well as scalable, off planet growth. Do you go hydroponic? Dirt in greenhouses? Artificial light or natural? If natural, how do you cut back on lethal doses of cosmic radiation? (Even plants have a lethal dose level) Also if natural lighting how do you not lose massive amounts of heat via your skylight system?
Now some may wonder where does twitter fit into this? Why did he buy it? The obvious is he wanted an unfiltered platform to yell into the void, but what if it is also to be duplicated on Colony X? Considering there is no Cydonia Book, no Xtegram, no Mars’ Space, and no legacy media, it makes sense to clone an existing product for the future Mars immigrants to communicate and gossip through.
Love him or hate him, be he genius or crazy, he is smart enough to hire the right people to make this work and use people with the cash on Earth to fund his projects as they test them for him (a real life Tom Sawyer?) locally and under the guise of “green initiatives” before shipping them 12 light minutes away.
In the end is he a Bond villain or do we save that title for someone else?
