The Chaser Report - How Elon Musk Wants To Populate Mars By Himself | Chris Taylor

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Christ Taylor joins Dom Knight to veer away from the politics of Earth for an episode, and instead focus on the politics of another planet -- Mars! How does Elon Musk plan on taking humanity to the stars? Listen and find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom, without Charles, but with Chris, Chris, Chris Taylor, a step back, the microphone after a fabulous appearance last week. Hello, Chris. Are you saying this is by popular demand or you couldn't get anybody else to... Well, you know, things are half true. There was a strong No More Charles move, and you said yes.

I don't have a LinkedIn, but if I do, I think, I think as part of my profile, I'll put one of Australia's top five Charles Firth impersonators. Well, no, per se, replace. Replaced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Overstudy. No, thank you very much for having me. I had such fun when we were talking about the British election last week and Biden, but we're not going to do politics this week. Yeah, let's not do Biden.

The other thing I want to talk about today, though, is Elon Musk's plan. His grand plan. To be president. Is he, because he, he wants much more than the wings. He can't be far off. Or maybe he, if you want to rule. the world. Yeah.

You don't want to be leader of America. No. You want to be in charge of the entire universe. You want to be planning flags in Mars. You do.

You want to run Mars and it's not just that he wants to be the sort of boss of Mars. He wants to populate Mars. Personally? He's quite fertile. And this is a fascinating piece. This is the New York Times.

It's called thermonuclear blasts and new species. So he's aiming big inside Elon Musk's plan to colonise Mars. Now, we've known for a long time that Elon Musk wanted us to become a multi-planetary species, as he said. But in a moment, I'll explain some of the bizarre details about how he plans

to get there. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. So yeah, this is really a thread that goes throughout his whole career, except for for Twitter. The notion of ruining Twitter is a bit of a distraction from his overall project. That's just his hobby. That's his hobby. But what he's wanted to do for a very long time is figure out how to get humans to Mars. In fact, even that bizarre, boring company,

the company that was going to tunnel underneath Los Angeles. Oh, that kind of boring. I thought you meant everyone there was very uninteresting. It's a pun that he, right. He actually, his sense of humor is, that's his level. Yeah. Is to try and, you know, work out how to tunnel into Mars. So he's been... For resources. Yeah, for resources. So SpaceX has been, is obviously the major venture that he has that's been trying to develop this. But he's trying to speed things up. So he's 53 years old.

He's announced that he wants to die on Mars. That's his plan. He wants to move to Mars. Is that his sales pitch? Colonised Mars. You will die there. But this is the thing. It can only be a one-way trip because it's so expensive to get there.

So if you're going to go there. He could maybe afford the return for it, but no one else could. How much is it to go to Mars? I don't know yet. But what he's working on? What's the rents like on Mars compared to Sydney? Well, yeah, one bedroom. Probably housing's okay there at the moment.

Sure, the fares, it's very expensive to get there. Once you're there. Cheapest chips. It would be hard for the landlords to evict you, wouldn't it, if they're back on Earth. They're building actually small dome habitats. SpaceX has already started work on this. So maybe if they're now the small dome habitats, we could, you know, get some of them in Sydney. So just get some parks or some spare space.

But how do we... It's one thing to have a dome. But schools, supermarkets, sporting facilities. I assume it's just the internet. You just get on the internet. No, certainly a nice sporting facility. Well, Uber eats deliver to Mars. How cold would your burger be if you're on Mars?

It'd probably be the same temperature. It's cold five kilometres away from my house. Yeah, it probably comes back warmer through the rockets. That's right. So all these things fit in. He wants everyone to drive those strange cyber trucks. He thinks that's the vehicle on Mars. And it all fits in together.

So the point being made in this article is that no one's ever set foot there. And if you set foot there, there's barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms and air, of course, that you can't breathe. But Elon thinks it's going to happen. Yeah, he says it's going to happen in multiple millions will be there very, very soon. Okay, I've always sort of seen the headlines of this story and not sort of gone on to read the detail because it felt like something that wouldn't happen in our lifetime. It just feels so sci-fi to me.

What's, can you explain to me, Dom, what's the reason for it? I get sort of, you know, grandiose ambition and sort of leaving a legacy and all of that, But I don't think it's, is it literally to solve an overpopulation problem or a Earth is out of resources problem? Why would you think an entirely uninhabitable, uninviting cold planet is better than what we have at the moment? I think it's potentially control. I think he wants to be the overlord of an entire planet. That's what I'm getting from this. And he doesn't think he can do Earth.

Well, I have that or he knows that Earth's essentially ruined. We've sort of ravaged it to the point where there's a fresh, he wants to ravage a fresh country. But even, you know, the strongest believers in climate change don't think it's going to be ravaged in the next 20 or 30 years. Yeah, I mean, to give the serious answer, he read Isaac Asimov as a kid and he's been obsessed with this idea you've ever seen. Okay, so that's all I needed to hear. So it's sort of that. It's a geeky dream. Yeah.

But it's also... But what family is going to go, kids, we're going to move? Oh, where are we going? Cameron? No, further. Melbourne, no. Ma, I mean, it's... Even further away than Adelaide.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, logistically, and as you said, once you're there, you're kind of point of no return. But his plans are far more advanced than you might imagine. So I was joking before about the fertility in the number of kids that he's want. He's volunteered already to donate his sperm to see if humans can reproduce on Mars. But it goes further. Apparently, he even wants to create his own species. He wants to bioengineer new organisms, little Elonites, who can potentially breathe on Mars or can cope better in Mars.

Okay, so it's not solving a human problem about Earth running out of space. It's actually creating a new species that can tolerate the atmosphere in Mars. Yeah, I assume it's people very much on the spectrum, like Elon that he wants, who have a very odd sense of humour and like what he's done with Twitter. Maybe he's just disappointed. Which is about a handful of people. Yeah, yeah. All the blue ticks from Twitter are going to go and live on Mars.

I'm just imagining like a custody dispute or something where you've got joint custody. And one of you lives on Mars. One of you lives on Earth. Yeah. The weekends, it's a hard handover, isn't it? It's a hard handover, yeah. I think you can't be late When the joint custody kid is arriving back from

And this is all of Elon's kids by the way I mean we often talk about frontier towns I don't know if you've ever been to places like I guess Alice Springs is one Port Headland broom Often you know remote towns And you go oh Everyone around here is sort of a bit itinerant

They're all sort of on the run from something That's right Mars will be that times a thousand Won't I think but people have got so much shit They've left behind on earth Like it's not nation's cremdala crop It's sort of people running from something or who really need a new start. And Mars is a new start.

It's very much a new start. Yeah, so it's basically like the sort of Star Wars Moss Isley times a thousand. But no, apparently a whole lot of the Elon crew, like the SpaceX, the hardcore believers want to do it. And I mean, the scale of this is quite extraordinary. So it's all domes. Like it's kind of like the movies. It's all glass domes. Like that Matt Damon.

Yeah, yeah. Big glass domes with like a communal. living quarter there might be a running track in a movie theater but i get live i i can get my head around being able to live there like you know oxygen tanks and all that kind of thing it's sort of what do you do on the weekend like are you just in the dome the whole you have to be you can't go outside you can't get outside so i mean it's a very dom centric lifestyle very yeah it's like covid it's basically like lockdown did that covid was his way of having a dress rehearsal can humans actually stay in live indoors and not go batty So it takes nine months to get there, is the plan.

Gee. And guess what he plans to do? Nine months? To solve the temperature problem. So the problem of how cold it is on Mars. Pink bats? Not far off. Solar panels built by Tesla, of course.

Okay. But here's the other idea. He wants to warm the planet with a series of thermonuclear explosions in Austin 30. So it's quite possible Peter Dunton. Regular ones, or can you just do a couple and that solves it? I think he's hoping you can solve it with a few, but you might need a bunch of them. to get this to happen. So he's very serious about massively fucking up Mars.

This is, be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Tommy. I'm genuinely torn on this. Part of the science geek in me is excited by the vision and the ambition and just seeing how are they going to achieve this. And sort of wanting to have a belief that it is doable. Like what in the 60s, you know, the race to put man on the moon? The race to colonise Mars.

Oh, there's something exciting about it. Whatever the actual ulterior motives are that Musk and these people have. There's something genuinely exciting about, oh, can we? That versus thinking it's the most bad shit and unnecessary idea. I'm not yet convinced it's a good fix for whatever problems it's trying to solve. I've just seen, by the way. Why not Venus? Isn't that closer?

The thermonuclear explosions will create artificial sun. So there you go. It's all easy. But I mean, this is, in many ways, this is no more crazy than what Muhammad bin Salman wants to do in Saudi Arabia. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast before. Are you across this whole Neon plan that he has? Only slightly. Yes, only slightly.

So this is a building that's, I think it's 170 kilometres long, 500 metres tall, 200 metres wide. And so essentially, and it would host millions and millions of residents in this giant's kind of vertical city in the desert. But here's the big difference. Massive skyscraper. Key difference. It's on Earth. You can, you can, you know, it doesn't take nine months to get to Saudi Arabia. Although, I must say.

It's probably cold or warmer in during the day. Would you rather be in, in Mars or in the middle of the Saudi Desert? I mean, in terms of inhospitable places where you can't really go outside, yes, you can breathe the air, but it's not going to be great fun frolicking in the sand, is it? Gee, that's a really interesting question. So would you rather? I think I'd rather Saudi Arabia. I think.

I would have a terrible choice. It's like, you know, you're kind of close to Turkey. You could have, you know, lovely holidays on the Turkish coast or something. The cuisine's quite good. Like, you're still on earth. You could come back to Australia to visit at Christmas. It's not a nine-month flight. I think that's, proximity is pretty key for me.

Yeah, I mean, I think what's that... Nine-month flight. I know, it's crazy, isn't it? People complain about 16 hours to LA, like with DVT and the, you know, the food. And what's the, what's the flight like for nine months? I mean, I think what settles it... You want a lot of movies. You know, a lot of movies.

I think what settles it for me is the notion that the entire planet will be populated by the descendants of Elon Musk. I think that's hilarious. I don't want to go there. I think that would... I'd love a camera that shows me what's going on up there. Yeah. Truman Show style. Oh, I just assume that's part of the bargain. If this happens, it's got to be televised.

But as much as... 24-hour 7 in Mars, just live feed. But as much as living in, you know, this sort of surveillance giant skyscraper run by the Saudis, I think I would take that over a world where every single person you talk to is to send it from Elon. I think that would be truly terrible. So there you go, what a choice.

The article's on the New York Times website. It's thermonuclear blasts and new species. The bizarre plan of Elon Musk to colonise Mars. It's all real. Do you think it'll happen, finally? Look, he's going to give it a red-hot crack. I think it will. I just have question mark on the timeline.

I'm not sure you and I will be here to take our grandchildren to Mars. Well, he says, I forgot to mention it, he says a million people living there within 20 years. That's his concept. Wow. But if it's anything like Tesla delivery schedules, that means 10 people in 50 years. Yeah. Yeah. I reckon it'll be closer to that.

And we'll be watching the feed from the comfort of our Saudi living room. Thanks for being on, Chris. Gary is from Road with part of the iconic class network. Catch you tomorrow. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.