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Oh hi, sorry. I was just roaming around our future home.
You know, Mars.
I wanted to talk about this today because it's fascinating
to me as just a geek in general,
but a space geek, and somebody that loves
what Elon Musk is doing with his companies.
And he has a plan now to actually colonize Mars.
Typically male, as my millennial cousin would say.
This plan is kind of insane, and so I thought,
let's dig into the data and see what the meat is
of it, and if it could really happen
and how much it would cost and all that.
So, Elon has said he wants to make Mars seem possible.
That's kind of the idea of what SpaceX is doing
with their Mars mission right now.
They say they want to go from early exploration
to a self-sustaining city on Mars.
So we're not just talking about astronauts landing
on Mars, doing their thing, like in The Martian.
We're talking about people living there,
creating a new society there, creating a,
becoming a multi planetary species.
Elon has said that if humanity doesn't land on Mars
in his lifetime, he'll be very disappointed.
Okay Elon, I guess we'll do it for you.
One more thing.
And he thinks we can get there by refueling in space
and by making the rockets reusable.
They have this really interesting way
of thinking about things, and it makes sense
because if you were to only take a plane once
and then throw away the plane, the cost of that
would be tremendously higher than it would be
if you were able to reuse it. So a plane,
a Boeing 737, comes in around $90 million,
and if you put two hundred people on it and only went once,
it'd be really expensive for each person.
Now, instead, you can get tickets from, say,
San Diego to Denver for 100 bucks.
So much, much cheaper than that $90 million split 200 ways.
But point being, we've never thought about it this way
in space travel. We've always thought once it's gone,
it's gone. In fact, just recently we crash landed
one of our space satellites on a comet that it had been
observing. Basically because it was running out of fuel,
going out of distance, and we'd never be able
to get the data back anyway. So, it's kind of the way
of life, or the way we've been thinking about it forever,
and to Elon's credit, the way he goes about all
of his stuff is to rethink what's possible.
So by reusing the rockets, and making them lighter,
he argues that a trip could cost $200,000.
Down from the maybe hundreds of billions
or infinite cost that it is now, since there's not even
a plan or a way to get there.
So sometime in the near future, you could be trying
to decide between a trip to Disneyland and Mars.
Disneyland's expensive, I dunno if you have kids,
if you've been there, but it's expensive.
But why go? Why go to Mars?
I mean, look at this place. Who would want to leave?
We've got everything we could want.
We've got great weather, we've got all this life,
but we may have to, because this right now
could be our sixth mass extinction event
on this planet. Looking at the layers of the earth,
all of the fossils that scientists have found
throughout the years, including all the species
that are currently alive, 98% of them have actually
gone extinct. So we're quite lucky to be here.
And if we want to continue the life of our species,
we need to figure out what to do, because life here
on earth is going to come to an end for us at some point.
So we need a plan to make it off this rock
if we truly want to survive.
So is it possible though? Could we really do this?
Well, in 10 years it may be possible to put the first
human mission on their way to Mars.
That's really optimistic, but it's not entirely impossible.
Now, Musk doesn't think of SpaceX as the company
that will do all of this. He said that "My vision
is for a fully reusable rocket transport system
between Earth and Mars that is able to refuel
on Mars."
This is very important, so you don't have to carry
the return fuel when you go there.
And he went into a lot of detail recently
on his SpaceX talk where they looked at the types
of fuels that they could make, and which ones would
be more efficient, and this and that.
See, Mars actually has quite a bit of resources.
It has lots of gasses, it has water, it has things
that we can mine and use to create fuel
and to live, essentially. Whereas other planets
and other places you may look at, Mercury, Venus,
Jupiter, a moon of Jupiter, they really don't have
anything there. Even our moon basically has nothing.
No atmosphere or anything. So, Mars really is the best bet,
and this might actually be possible. Elon is pretty crazy.
But how long would it really take to get there?
NASA has said it's six months or more just to go one way,
and of course it'd be incredibly dangerous,
who knows what could go wrong, you know,
everything could fail,
or, you know, it could take much longer than that.
You could miss the orbit entirely.
Thankfully, due to Newton and Einstein's
Theory of Relativity, we're pretty good at calculating
these things, so we think we would be able to do it.
But, if you could refuel in space, then you could speed
up so fast, and then subsequently slow down so fast,
that you would be able to get there
in three to five months. I mean, in three to five months
you could get your beach body ready for summer,
you could start a new blog, you could make half a baby,
you could get a degree online, and you could even
walk from San Diego to Boston, if you wanted to.
That's 20 miles a day for 150 days, I don't know,
that'd be, if anybody ever does that let me know,
I'd love to see the video.
So Elon has said it would take six months to go to Mars
if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost.
Then it would take 18 months for the planets to realign,
then it would take six months to get back.
Though he can see the travel time getting down to
three months and five months, if America has the will.
But will it happen? Well, I certainly hope so.
As a lifelong geek, as a kid all I wanted to do
was to be an astronaut and go to space, so to see this
happen within my lifetime potentially,
or within my son's lifetime, would be amazing.
It would be something that I think would help us
put perspective on who we are and where we stand
in the scheme of things in this universe,
but SpaceX has admitted they're really only dedicating
about 5% of their resources on the Mars stuff,
so right now it's really just more talk than anything.
But if we could work out the bazillion science, engineering,
ethical, legal, and funding issues? We probably could do it.
I say let's take it seriously as soon as SpaceX does.
And Elon has even said, "I would like to die on Mars...
Just not on impact."
So, I'm with him, I think that would be a tremendous way
to go out. Not in impact, of course.
So thanks for joining me on this journey,
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I really appreciate you giving me your attention today,
I hope you enjoyed this video, and until next time,
I'm gonna be looking for my new house on Mars.
Holy shit.