Will Musk Colonize Mars In His Lifetime? The Answer Won't Surprise You

As part of the Spacecoin Writing Contest, the fine folks at Spacecoin and HackerNoon have asked: Will Elon Musk colonize Mars in his lifetime?

It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by colonize. If you mean creating a vibrant, large-scale settlement in the grandiose Kim Stanley Robinson sense of the word, the answer, unsurprisingly, is no.

That’s not to say there won’t be some kind of Martian foothold in the not-too-distant future. We’ll likely see boots on the ground before Musk shuffles off this mortal coil for a questionable afterlife on a Neuralink server. And when that moment comes, the media spectacle alone will be worth the wait.

The first selfie, taken against a rust-colored sky and beamed across the void by The First Human On Mars, will break the internet, triggering profound audience capture and giving Earth’s perpetually outraged masses something to argue for instead of against. At least for a few news cycles.

Of course, the reality lurking behind the euphoric headlines will be far less cinematic.

What The Mars Foothold Might Look Like

A functional, self-sustaining colony in Musk’s lifetime—as in a place where people live, love, and build lives that don’t hinge on recurring supply drops—just isn’t in the cards.

The problem isn’t lack of ambition. It’s physics, biology, and the Red Planet’s fundamental indifference toward our delusions of Martian grandeur.

What will we see? Probably a mishmash spectacle of 20-minute time delayed live streams and gritty DITL updates on X peppered with ironic branding opportunities. And of course, a few extremely lonely astronauts transmitting increasingly bleak vlogs to the good folks back home.

Think a glorified Antarctic research outpost but with worse WiFi, or The Martian, but less funny and with more product placements. Which is to say, we won’t see anything resembling the glassine Martian arcologies or gerontological life-extension clinics of Red Mars.

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A Skeptic’s Guide To SpaceX’s Roadmap To Mars

Here is a passage taken from SpaceX’s Mars & Beyond Roadmap To Making Humanity Multiplanetary. And I quote:

Why Mars? At an average distance of 140 million miles, Mars is one of Earth's closest habitable neighbors. Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.

I have to tip my hat to the copy editors at SpaceX. This is a really effective piece of writing. One carefully engineered understatement after another designed to coax the reader into a quasi-hypnotic, carefree state. Martian life, evidently, is bliss.

Spin of this caliber is remarkably persuasive. The language and economy of expression is so gentle and unassuming it would lull a caffeinated squirrel to sleep. Not so much sterile corporate-speak, but a form of lowkey verbal jujitsu that by comparison makes the summit of Mt. Everest sound like a Sandals resort.

For example, calling Mars “one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors” is like a realtor describing a condemned building as “full of potential” or an airline referring to a mid-air explosion as an “unscheduled rapid deboarding event.”

It’s the same rhetorical sleight of hand that could rebrand suffocating in a barren, radiation-blasted wasteland as “adapting to novel atmospheric conditions.”

Mars is “habitable” in the same way the bottom of the Marianas Trench is. Habitable, sure, technically speaking, but only if you stick the landing, bring your own highly complex life support systems, and make peace with the constant, looming specter of instant death.

Allow Me To Translate Further In More Practical Terms

Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight.

Translation: Mars is so far away, the Sun will look like a small anemic disk in the sky. And thanks to the planet’s pathetically thin atmosphere and no global magnetic field, hazardous energy particles from said anemic disc, along with a constant bombardment of cosmic radiation, will scramble your DNA and pose significant long-term health risks like cancer and acute radiation sickness.

It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.

Translation: It’s really cold. Colder than Antarctica at its absolute worst. For reference, the median surface temperate is –85°F and can dip to around -225°F. The kind of cold that will induce frostbite faster than you can say “terraforming.” Speaking of, we’re looking further into radically transforming the entire planet’s climate via nukes, moholes, and orbital mirrors. Heads-up, it could take a while, so pack extra sweaters.

We can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.

Translation: I don’t even know where to begin. #JustCompressIt

Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.

Translation: You can lift heavy objects and do sick backflips. But your newfound super-power comes at a cost. Prolonged exposure to low gravity will lead to back pain, muscle atrophy, and bone density loss. Oh, and Martian gravity might, among other things, mess with your organs and eyesight, too. Make no mistake, your body is evolved for life on Earth, not Mars. Given the absence of artificial gravity, bring a gym bag and prepare for an intense regimen of frequent exercise.

Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.

Translation: Mars has a 24-hour and 37-minute day. Your circadian rhythm might not be too off-kilter, but that’s assuming you can even sleep at night. You know, Claustrophobic Existential Dread (CED) of living in a glorified tin can for the rest of your life where a single system failure means instant death.

(Let’s also note the roadmap’s strategic omission of the fine dust situation on Mars. Dust like orange talcum powder that will get into everything. EVERYTHING. Computers, living modules, rovers, your bloodstream. Often leading to headaches, sinus trouble, sore throat, bronchitis, lung distress, and the occasional hardware malfunction that spells no uncertain doom.)

Don’t Get Me Wrong, I’m Rooting For Becoming A Multiplanetary Species

I really am. There’s something undeniably seductive about the notion. Back in the 2010s, before the Texas Exodus, I toured SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, CA. I rubbed elbows with brilliant aerospace engineers and inspected Merlin engines up close. The sheer audacity of such precision-controlled hellfire. It was a genuinely inspiring experience.

There’s poetry in the idea of some future descendant of the first Martian standing atop a wind-sculpted dune and pointing at a pale blue dot in the sky and thinking, That’s where great-great-grandpapa grew up.

But a colony in Musk’s lifetime? No. Not in any meaningful, civilization-altering sense of the word. For now, that’s a fantasy best left to sci-fi novelists and TED Talk enthusiasts.

And yet—perhaps absurdly, naively—it’s a fantasy worth having. Because even if the SpaceX roadmap is more branding exercise than blueprint, there’s something deeply human about looking up and wanting more. About staring at a barren red rock 140 million miles away and thinking, we should try anyway.

The reckless belief that maybe we could has a gravity of its own. In a world dominated by cynicism, doomscrolling, and algorithmically optimized despair, maybe it’s one force we shouldn’t try to escape.

Product placements and all.