Life on Mars

Billionaire entrepreneur wants vegetarian-only colony on Mars

Highlights from this article include:

Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and the one in charge of creating SpaceX, wants a colony on Mars for 80,000 people. Only one problem, they must all be vegetarians.

Presumably it would be easier to set up a colony of vegetarians on Mars, as then it would only be necessary to grow vegetables in some form; whatever the case, this is what Musk is insisting and planning on.

He is now setting his sights on a city on Mars, with 80,000 vegetarian inhabitants. While this might sound far-fetched, scientists are predicting that human settlements could happen on Mars and elsewhere in space in the very near future.

Musk just wishes to take the plans a little further by building the city on Mars, using sustainable technology. He plans to send people into space on a "huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane." However, when he says sustainable, he also means the inhabitants' diets, and that means vegetarianism or more accurately veganism, meaning no animal products at all.

Musk plans that people could travel to the settlement on the red planet at a cost of $500,000.

“The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip,” Musk said.

Musk further said that the first adventurers heading to Mars would have the necessary machines to produce oxygen, methane and fertilizer from the atmosphere of the red planet and would have access to subsurface water ice, as well as construction materials for large transparent domes in which to grow Earth crops for food.

No way am I doing that. I’ve seen the Doctor Who episode The Waters of Mars. I know what happens when you have access to subsurface water ice. One minute you’re growing carrots in a bio-dome and the next you look like this:

Your face has gone all cracked and water pours endlessly from your mouth and you become EVIL and try to take over the world.

While I think veganism the best diet for a healthy happy planet, no way is that planet going to be Mars.