Elon Musk's inter-planetary fantasy spells danger for Mars

Elon Musk unleashed a wave of green excitement this week when he said his Tesla company was just days away from rolling out its first electric car for the masses. With a price tag of $35,000, Tesla's Model 3 aims to do to the petrol car what the iPhone did to fixed-line telephones, with the added extras of cleaner air, quieter streets and less oil use.

It won't be alone. Tesla's existing luxury plug-in cars have helped galvanise traditional carmakers. Witness this week's striking news from Volvo that all its new models will be totally or partly electric from 2019.

As Mr Musk said when he unveiled the Model 3 last year: "This is really important for the future of the world."

I hope it all works out. I also think Mr Musk is an extraordinary man. Apart from Tesla, his SpaceX company's reusable rocket systems promise a new era of cheaper space travel.

His gigantic Nevada "gigafactory" aims to make cheaper, better batteries that could hasten the shift to greener transport and energy. His sleek Powerwall home batteries and smart solar roof tiles have begun to make clean power look hip and desirable. Few other Silicon Valley billionaires are striving to be so useful.

Yet all this makes it hard to understand his obsession with something that is scientifically suspect and might even hamper efforts to tackle the great environmental challenge of climate change: his plan to colonise Mars.

He set out his latest thoughts a few weeks ago, explaining how reusable technology could cut costs so that a self-sustaining city of 1m people could eventually be settled on Mars.

I have no problem with his enthusiasm. Only an unimaginative dullard would deny the thrill and ingenuity of space travel. I can also forgive Mr Musk for skating over some technical challenges, including the need to protect Mars-bound spacecraft from too much radiation.

What is troubling is, first, he seems to think of Mars much as early European explorers viewed Africa and the Americas, as places to be colonised regardless of the consequences.

Mars is in a pristine state and experts say it should stay that way if we are ever to find proof of past or present life there. Plonking a city of 1m humans on it could wreak havoc with such efforts, according to veteran space scientists such as Andrew Coates of University College London, who is working on the ExoMars rover due to launch in 2020.

Prof Coates says the big global dust storms on Mars could carry specks of terrestrial matter across the planet that scientists could mistake for evidence of Martian life. He also worries about Mr Musk's breezy attitude to the brutally cold weather on Mars, where temperatures average minus 63C. Mr Musk says we can "warm it up" and even grow plants "just by compressing the atmosphere", but fails to explain how.

Those who have mooted solutions talk of "terraforming" Mars, perhaps by introducing powerful greenhouse gases - just like the ones Earthlings are struggling to cut on the one planet where we know that life can exist.

But there's a larger worry about Mr Musk's Mars vision: money. He thinks his plan could work if space travel costs drop to about $200,000 a person, a figure that suggests a starting price of $200bn just to populate his city.

Mr Musk says many in the private sector want to help out and the main reason he is amassing his own fortune is to "make the biggest contribution I can" to multi-planetary life. But he also thinks governments might like to chip in and that "ultimately, this is going to be a huge public-private partnership".

Really? This seems a big ask considering the sums needed to shift away from the fossil fuels that threaten to warm Earth beyond bearable human limits.

It is estimated that meeting the aims of the Paris climate agreement means investing an extra $300bn to $600bn a year in greener energy systems - a goal that was tough enough before Donald Trump decided to pull the world's largest economy out of the accord.

It's more unsettling to think of what the money and time spent on developing technologies for Mars travel, not least by trailblazers such as Mr Musk, could do if diverted to clean energy breakthroughs. More than 20 governments have agreed to spend $30bn a year by 2021 on green power advances. Wealthy individuals are pitching in too. But far more could be done.

It's true that governments in rich countries may not need to choose between funding space travel and fighting climate change, nor well-intentioned billionaires. But they should not need to. Ultimately, there is something unseemly about the idea of the world's wealthiest shooting off to Mars and leaving the rest of us behind on a failing planet, especially those who say they want to save it.

The world would be far better off if Mr Musk concentrated his brilliant mind on preserving Earth, and forgot all about Mars until that job was even halfway done.

The writer is the FT's environment correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017