Elaine Ou, Columnist

Who Wants a Ticket to Mars?

Colonizing the red planet will be much less pleasant than Elon Musk makes it out to be.

September 28, 2016 at 4:34 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Not a hospitable place.
Photograph: NASA

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made a splash at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico with his plans for an Interplanetary Transport System, along with a disturbingly inspirational ultimatum:

“There are really two fundamental paths. One path is we stay on Earth forever and there will be some eventual extinction event... The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, which, I hope you would agree, that is the right way to go.”