Elon Musk has made a bold statement that a city of one million will flourish on Mars within 30 years. Now a leading scientist has warned that Musk’s plan could prove disastrous for the planet.
Professor Andrew Coates, a physicist and Mars researcher at University College London, argued that human settlers would pollute the planet and threaten the search for extraterrestrial life.
He argued that humanity should only send one astronaut to Mars if we are ever to learn the truth about life in our solar system.
“The last thing we need to do is get life from Earth to Mars.” Robotic research is the right way,” adds the scientist, writes “Daily Mail”.
Musk’s new claims about the future of human exploration of Mars come as SpaceX makes its biggest breakthrough yet.
On October 13, the company successfully landed its 71-meter Super Heavy accelerator. It carried a 3,000-ton rocket 40 miles (65 km) into the air before separating and heading back to the launch pad, where it was caught by robotic arms.
The booster is the largest ever built by SpaceX and is needed to get the massive Starship spacecraft into orbit.
This success raised hopes for cheaper, more efficient space travel capable of carrying settlers and resources to Mars.
According to Elon Musk, in the next 30 years it is possible to build a city on Mars in which one million people will live.
However, Professor Coates warns that building a human settlement on such a scale would pose serious problems for scientists.
Professor Coates is part of the team developing the mission of NASA’s Rosalind Franklin rover, which will probe beneath the surface of Mars to look for signs of extraterrestrial microbial life.
By sending human explorers to the Red Planet, SpaceX will inevitably contaminate the surface with biological material.
This contamination would make it much more difficult for researchers such as Professor Coates to spot subtle signs of past or present extraterrestrial life on the planet, bTV reports.
“Ultimately, Elon Musk would like to take people to the moon and potentially to Mars, but I think we have to be a little careful with that last one.” We have to be very careful in how we prepare the missions, doing a lot of technology cleanup to make sure we don’t bring life to Mars. That’s the last thing we want to do,” he commented.