Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk not only wants to send other people to Mars, but also himself. However, life on the red planet would be no fun – and no emergency plan for the people who want to escape earth.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s big dream is well known: he wants to bring people to Mars to make humanity an interplanetary species. Elon Musk already has the right rocket with the Falcon Heavy. And SpaceX is currently working on the spaceship that was recently renamed Starship by BFR. In 2022, if everything goes according to plan, the first unmanned flight to Mars will take place. Then, two years later, a first manned mission. Now Elon Musk has stated that he would of course also like to be one of the Mars settlers himself – and knows pretty well what he would be getting into.

“I’m talking about moving there,” says Elon Musk of the HBO news site Axios . However, he would not do that in order to lie on the rotten skin on Mars or become a Mars dictator. Like everyone else, he would then “work non-stop to build the base” that he plans with Mars Base Alpha. There is hardly any free time. Even once the habitat has been established, the planet is one of the most hostile environments a person can imagine. “So there is a big chance that you will die there,” Musk says. “We think you can come back, but we’re not really sure.”

An expensive trip to certain death?

Even if some would accuse him of this, Mars is currently not an “emergency exit for rich people” like him, Musk said. He can imagine that tickets to Mars will be offered “for a few hundred thousand dollars”. But the advertisements for such a trip would probably be the same as those that Ernest Shackleton once had for his Antarctic expedition: They campaigned for men who wanted to embark on an adventure in the bitter cold, months of darkness, constant danger and uncertain return. “It’s going to be difficult,” Musk says. “The possibility of dying is high.”

Nevertheless, Elon Musk believes that in the future he will be on board one of his spaceships to the red planet. The probability is 70% that it will start in maybe seven years. Elon Musk has repeatedly confirmed in the past that colonizing Mars would be the only chance for humanity to survive as a species. Because too simply a global catastrophe or a war could wipe out all people.

Just recently, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had publicly stated that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO could be the person who will shape the future of humanity the most in the long term. “Elon Musk doesn’t just deliver the next cool technology,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson . “He is thinking about how he can lead our civilization into the next century. It has to do with transportation, with exploring space. Why? Because there are unlimited resources in space – resources we fight for on Earth. “