Astronomer Royal warned that Elon Musk harbors a “dangerous delusion” that a colony could be established on Mars.
Prof Lord Martin Rees, who is also co-founder of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, said it would be easier to solve climate change on Earth than trying to escape to another planet.
Speaking on the House of Lords podcast Lord Speaker’s Corner, Lord Rees said travel to other planets should be left to private pioneers and should not be the aim of national governments.
He called Musk an “extraordinary figure” with a “pretty strange personality” but said he disagreed with his plan to build a city on Mars.
“I don’t agree with him on that. I think a few crazy pioneers could live on Mars, just like the people living in the South Pole, although it’s much less hospitable than the South Pole,” he said.
“But the idea that he and a few other space enthusiasts espouse of mass migration to avoid Earth’s problems is, in my opinion, a dangerous delusion.
“I don’t think this is realistic and we need to solve these problems here on Earth. Dealing with climate change on Earth is nonsense compared to terraforming Mars. “So I don’t think we should keep this as a long-term goal.”
Musk announced plans to build a settlement on Mars in 2016, saying he hoped to make humans a multi-planetary species.
The long-term goal of his company, SpaceX, was to design rockets and spacecraft that could take off and land on the surfaces of other planets.
The company recently completed the successful orbital launch of the Starship ship, which will take humans to the Moon and beyond.
In its latest launch, SpaceX said that in the future, Starship will make many trips to Mars, taking materials and equipment to establish a city.
Musk has said he believes Mars could be a “backup driver” for humanity in the event of catastrophic global warming, asteroid impact or nuclear winter, and that the planet could be heated by nuclear weapons.
Lord Rees said: “It has done a much better job than the big conglomerates working for NASA at producing efficient rockets that can be reused and this will make it cheaper to send materials into space and more possible to have some rockets engineered in space and even solar power.” collected from space.
“My line on human spaceflight is that it shouldn’t be publicly funded, especially by government agencies, because they have to be very safety conscious, and that makes it very expensive.
“Robots can do anything practical, like building large structures in space and exploring the surface of Mars. If people want to fly into space as an adventure, maybe they can be supported by sponsorships or billionaires.
“We know that Masses Musk and Bezos are spending billions of dollars on space exploration, and maybe they can launch people into space as adventurers who are willing to accept a very high risk and therefore launch much more cheaply.
“In my opinion, robots should do all the practical things, and only people with a really high risk appetite should go into space, and they should be privately financed, not by the rest of us.”
Lord Rees also said he was deeply concerned about the possibility of a deadly virus being engineered in the laboratory through gain-of-function research aimed at boosting the potency of a pathogen.
Although he said he believed humans would survive the 21st century, he added: “We may get to a stage where some biologists can literally play God at the kitchen table and make a new version of a virus, which is a huge, very dangerous development.”
“Covid-19, as we know, is spreading around the world, and what is even worse in my opinion is the possibility of malicious people producing more dangerous viruses, because it is possible to make viruses more lethal and contagious than natural viruses through a technique called gain of function. varieties.
“And if this could be done and this leaked out, either accidentally or by design, this could cause an outbreak worse than the natural ones.”
He called for better regulation and supervision of laboratory experiments.
“I think the only way we can keep ourselves safe enough from the potential catastrophe of an engineered pandemic is to accept more intrusive surveillance than we have had to accept so far,” he added.