Inside life in Elon Musk’s Mars colony – with vegan diets and ‘terraforming’ red planet into SECOND Earth

Billionaire Elon Musk has long been vocal about his ambitions for colonizing Mars – here’s everything we know about his plan.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and since then has constantly reiterated one of his biggest goals is to help make humankind a multi-planetary species.

Elon Musk hopes to colonize Mars in our lifetime

In order to achieve this otherworldly feat, the world’s richest man (at the time of publishing) turned his attention to the red planet, located approximately 33.9 million miles away from Earth.

“If we are able to make life self-sustaining on Mars, we will have passed one of the greatest filters. That then sets us up to become interstellar,” Musk wrote on Twitter in November.

“Earth is ~4.5B years old, but life is still not multi-planetary and it is extremely uncertain how much time is left to become so,” he added.

So far, Musk’s long-term vision for Mars looks something like building a self-sustaining city that features solar-powered hydroponic farms and vegan diets.

“The next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there,” Musk told Time.

“Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring more than two, though — it’s a little weird if there’s only two,” he continued.  

Terraforming Mars

In Elon’s scenario, humans and animals would live permanently in this Mars city – albeit in “glass domes” – until the process of terraforming happens.

‘Terraforming’ is the hypothetical process of modifying a martian surface to make it habitable by Earth-like life.

In this case, terraforming would eventually allow humans to breathe on the red planet without oxygen masks or glass domes.

Still, even Musk added that terraforming would be “too slow to be relevant in our lifetime,” however, humans could certainly establish a human base on Mars in this lifetime.

How to potentially colonize Mars

So what does this human base look like, and how do we build it?

It starts with building a large fleet of SpaceX Starships that could carry the required amount of equipment and supplies required to get a settlement going, per The Space Review.

Theoretically, if one Starship stage can carry 200 tons of cargo to the surface of Mars, then 5,000 trips would be able to carry one million tons.

Once the equipment has successfully been transported to Mars, the next concern is food production.

According to The Space Review, around 200 square meters of growing area with 100 kilowatts of power would be needed per person, which equates to a construction crew of 100 people with 10 megawatts of power and 20,000 square meters of growing area for food production.

In theory, a one-square-kilometer farm transferred to Mars (250 by 250 meters with four growing levels), could potentially feed 5,000 vegetarians. 

Geologists could also potentially discover mineral site deposits, which would greatly serve the settlement.

UnSplashInitially, humans would breathe on Mars using oxygen masks, but then would terraform, according to Musk[/caption]

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