Elon Musk is nothing short of an intriguing character. In a GQ interview, he revealed how he plans to colonize Mars, and what obstacles he might encounter along the way.
SpaceX, one of Musk's companies, is based in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. This is where a visionary team gathers each week to develop the "Mars colonial transport architecture."
But exactly how will the "Mars colonial transport architecture" be put into practice?
SpaceX develops the technology to make the mission possible. To reach the Red Planet, the program needs a multi-use rocket technology able to ferry numerous people and cargoes. Musk's company also does the fundraising for the research, so that the transportation happens as the geeky multimillionaire imagines it.
The space company already crafted smaller-scope reusable rockets, and one will launch in a few days.
Musk, currently 44, thinks that by the time he reaches his fifties, a manned mission to Mars will be ready to deploy. The rocket, which is highly ambitious in size, has a very descriptive code name: BFR.
Musk confesses that he named the rocket after the best weapon in the classic video game Doom, dubbed BFG 9000. The acronym stood for Big Fucking Gun, so now Musk develops a Big Fucking Rocket.
"Well, there's two parts of it-there's a booster rocket and there's a spaceship," Musk points out.
He notes that the rocket only serves to help the spaceship break off from Earth's gravity, and that once it enters orbit, it will be able to make the full trip on its own.
"[The spaceship] has enough capability to get all the way back here by itself. It needs a helping hand out of Earth's gravity well," Musk explained.
However, the space company currently focuses on the crew vehicle that will transport astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX and NASA hold regular meetings to review the design of the spacecraft, and Musk tells more about the back and forth process in the GQ interview.
When asked how much time a day he spends imagining the colonization of Mars, Musk confessed that he thinks about it quite a lot.
"There's a window that could be opened for a long time or a short time where we have an opportunity to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars," Musk affirms.
He uses the example of the year 1912, when everyone thought that an age of peace and prosperity was ahead. The two consecutive world wars and the Cold War that followed proved that stability is sometimes just an illusion.
Musk makes it clear that the Martian human settlement can be a "backup" for human life as we know it.
"You back up your hard drive.... Maybe we should back up life, too?" the inventor rhetorically asks.
Musk states that the possibility of a World War III should not be excluded, and the worst case scenario could include nuclear warfare. In that event, some anti-technology movements could arise and the opportunity window for space travel could come to a halt.
In an ironic twist, a few months ago Musk advocated for the use of thermonuclear weapons on Mars.
"Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," he said while in the studio of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
He proposed this apparently radical solution during a talk about the terraforming of the Red Planet. He later explained that the idea would not harm the planet's environment, but would simply melt the icy glaciers from the poles to transform the ice into liquid water. By modifying the planet's surface, a hospitable atmosphere could host human life without the need for special shelters.
"There would be no radiation or mushroom clouds or fallout or anything like that," he assured future Martian pioneers.
