Dr. Crystal Dilworth has a fireside chat with space entrepreneur Elon Musk and inventor and computational neuroscientist Philip Low to discover how they are changing the world and why. Special thank you to David Franzen for hosting this late night chat at the Canadian Consul General's Residence in Los Angeles.
Elon Musk compared the biological adaptations that could be required for humans or other organisms to live on Mars to the process of breeding cows to conform to our needs as a society. The problem is that modern cattle are the product of hundreds of generations of tweaking to various breeds, but future space explorers won’t have the luxury of being bred for the job of colonizing Mars through the centuries.
Instead, he suggests that “while it’s a tricky subject… we’d probably want to create synthetic organisms.” A tricky subject indeed — will we need to create more perfect clones of our finest astronauts to begin colonizing the rest of our solar system? Or maybe just start with some super radiation-resistant hermit crabs that can setup some burrows to get things going?
Musk didn’t directly answer a question about whether SpaceX would be interested in conducting initial research into the feasibility of a Martian colony, but he did make it clear that it’s something he’s looked into in detail. He explained that, in his view, a key step to getting established on Mars would be to compress the amount of time it takes to make the trip from Earth to our neighbor planet.
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Elon Musk compared the biological adaptations that could be required for humans or other organisms to live on Mars to the process of breeding cows to conform to our needs as a society. The problem is that modern cattle are the product of hundreds of generations of tweaking to various breeds, but future space explorers won’t have the luxury of being bred for the job of colonizing Mars through the centuries.
Instead, he suggests that “while it’s a tricky subject… we’d probably want to create synthetic organisms.” A tricky subject indeed — will we need to create more perfect clones of our finest astronauts to begin colonizing the rest of our solar system? Or maybe just start with some super radiation-resistant hermit crabs that can setup some burrows to get things going?
Musk didn’t directly answer a question about whether SpaceX would be interested in conducting initial research into the feasibility of a Martian colony, but he did make it clear that it’s something he’s looked into in detail. He explained that, in his view, a key step to getting established on Mars would be to compress the amount of time it takes to make the trip from Earth to our neighbor planet.
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