In all the planets of our home galaxy, humankind happens to discover itself on a planet which is perfectly suitable for life. Earth isn't without its dangers however. Earth has seen five massive extinctions throughout its history, due to catastrophic disasters like huge asteroids and massive volcanic outbursts. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is very much concerned about the next mass destruction.
Musk says we certainly can't afford to just wait around and find out.In his article, Urban provides us another way to think about it: Visualize Earth as a hard drive, and every single species is a word document saved on that hard drive. The hard drive has already been crashed at least five times, and each time it misses a giant piece of those documents (species being vanished). So you can reflect the human species as an extremely valuable document generated on that hard drive: “Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do? You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.”
humanity's backup drive.
Musk doesn't just want to send a minority of colonists to Mars, either; he'd like to send 1 million people to the red planet. If we want anything similar to the industry and stuff built here on Earth, and generous-genetic variety, then we'll need no less than that many people to get things going perfectly. That's the just the only way we'll persist as a species on Mars, Musk apparently told Urban.
Later this year, via his rocket firm SpaceX, Musk plans to disclose a spacecraft designed to transport as many as 100 people at a time to the Mars.