(Courtesy NASA)Over at Speaking of Science I have posted a few thoughts on Elon Musk and his plan to colonize Mars. Shorter version: Putting even one person on Mars, never mind a million people, is going to be very hard. But the risks are cumulative, the costs are incalculable, things go wrong, and any timeline that imagines humans on Mars in the next decade is magical thinking. No one’s trying to dash anyone’s dreams here, but colonizing Mars isn’t simply a matter of rocket science. But Mars is not, for me, a satisfying Option B in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Source: Washington Post September 28, 2016 21:32 UTC