Elon Musk's Mars Dream Is Worth Rooting For

When I met Tony Martinez, the mayor of Brownsville, Texas, he had a somewhat wacky argument against the border fence that separated the town from Matamoros, Mexico. "We are about to become an interplanetary civilization," he told me. "And here we are talking about a wall separating what is essentially the same community." The reason he said so is that Brownsville is included in Tesla founder Elon Musk's rather specific plans for the colonization of Mars, published in the June issue of the journal New Space.

Musk's moonshot ideas -- the hyperloop super-fast ground transportation, connecting human brains to computers, tunneling to make the hyperloop and other forms of fast transportation possible -- all go beyond science fiction in that companies are formed, staff are hired and engineering solutions are developed. Musk makes them look real because he likes building things and publicizes them because he doesn't seem to be able to resist publicity. Perhaps more importantly, these sci-fi-like projects help maintain investor faith in his commercial ventures, particularly in Tesla, whose $61 billion capitalization is now the same as BMW's though the German carmaker's revenue is higher by an order of magnitude.