Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive

Strap yourselves in,

we're going to Mars.

Not just a few astronauts.

Thousands of people
are going to colonize Mars.

And I am telling you that they're
going to do this soon.

Some of you will end up
working on projects on Mars

and I guarantee that some of your
children will end up living there.

That probably sounds preposterous,

so I'm going to share with you
how and when that will happen.

But first I want to discuss
the obvious question:

why the heck should we do this?

12 years ago,

I gave a talk on 10 ways
the world could end suddenly.

We are incredibly vulnerable
to the whims of our own galaxy.

A single, large astroid
could take us out forever.

To survive we have to reach
beyond the home planet.

Think what a tragedy it would be

if all that humans have accomplished
were suddenly obliterated.

And there's another reason we should go:

exploration is in our DNA.

Two million years ago
humans evolved in Africa

and then slowly but surely
spread out across the entire planet

by reaching into the wilderness
that was beyond their horizons.

This stuff is inside us.

And they prospered doing that.

Some of the greatest advances
in civilization and technology

came because we explored.

Yes, we could do a lot of good

with the money it will take to establish
a thriving colony on Mars,

and yes we should all be taking
far better care of our own home planet,

and yes,

I worry we could screw up Mars
the way we've screwed up Earth.

But think for a moment,

what we had when John F. Kennedy
told us we would put a human on the moon.

He excited an entire generation to dream.

Think how inspired we will be
to see a landing on Mars,

perhaps then we will look back at Earth

and see that that is one
people instead of many

and perhaps then we
will look back at Earth,

as we struggle to survive on Mars,

and realize how precious
the home planet is.

So ...

let me tell you about the extraordinary
adventure we're about to take.

But first,

a few fascinating facts
about where we're going.

This picture actually represents
the true size of Mars compared to Earth.

Mars is not our sister planet.

It's far less than half
the size of the Earth,

and yet despite the fact
that it's smaller,

the surface area of Mars
that you can stand on

is equivalent to the surface area
of the Earth that you can stand on,

because the Earth
is mostly covered by water.

The atmosphere on Mars is really thin --

100 times thinner than on Earth

and it's not breathable,

it's 96 percent carbon dioxide.

It's really cold there.

The average temperature
is minus 81 degrees,

although there is a quite
a range of temperature.

A day on Mars is about
as long as a day on Earth,

plus about 39 minutes.

Seasons and years on Mars
are twice as long as they are on Earth.

And for anybody who wants to strap
on some wings and go flying one day,

Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth,

and it's the kind of place

where you can jump over your car
instead of walk around it.

Now as you can see,

Mars isn't exactly Earth-like,

but it's by far the most livable other
place in our entire solar system.

Here's the problem.

Mars is a long way away,

1,000 times farther away from us
than our own moon.

The Moon is 250,000 miles away

and it took Apollo astronauts
three days to get there.

Mars is 250,000,000 miles away

and it will take us
eight months to get there --

240 days.

And that's only if we launch
on a very specific day,

at a very specific time,

once every two years,

when Mars and the Earth
are aligned just so,

so the distance that the rocket
will have to travel will be the shortest.

240 days is a long time to spend
trapped with your colleagues in a tin can.

And meanwhile,

our track record
of getting to Mars is lousy.

We and the Russians,

the Europeans,

the Japanese,

the Chinese

and the Indians,

have actually sent 44 rockets there,

and the vast majority of them
have either missed or crashed.

Only about a third of the missions
to Mars have been successful.

And we don't at the moment have
a rocket big enough to get there anyway.

We once had that rocket,

the Saturn V.

A couple of Saturn Fives
would have gotten us there.

It was the most magnificent
machine ever built by humans,

and it was the rocket
that took us to the Moon.

But the last Saturn V was used in 1973
to launch the Skylab space station,

and we decided to do
something called the shuttle

instead of continuing onto Mars
after we landed on the Moon.

The biggest rocket we have now

is only half big enough
to get us anything to Mars.

So getting to Mars
is not going to be easy

and that brings up a really
interesting question:

how soon will the first humans
actually land here?

Now some [pundits] think
if we got there by 2050,

that'd be a pretty good achievement.

These days,

NASA seems to be saying that it can
get humans to Mars by 2040.

Maybe they can.

I believe that they can get human
beings into Mars orbit by 2035,

but frankly,

I don't think they're going to bother
in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars,

because we will already be there.

We're going to land on Mars in 2027.

And the reason is,

this man is determined
to make that happen.

His name is Elon Musk,

he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Now he actually told me
that we would land on Mars by 2025,

but Elon Musk is more
optimistic than I am,

and that's going aways --

so I'm giving him a couple
of years of slack.

Still ...

you've got to ask yourself,

can this guy really do this
by 2025 or 2027?

Well let's put a decade with Elon Musk
into a little perspective.

Where was this 10 years ago?

That's the Tesla electric automobile.

In 2005,

a lot of people in the automobile
industry were saying,

we would not have a decent
electric car for 50 years.

And where was that?

That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket,

lifting six tons of supplies
to the International Space Station.

10 years ago,

SpaceX had not launched anything,

or fired a rocket to anywhere.

So I think it's a pretty good bet

that the person who is revolutionizing
the automobile industry

in less than 10 years

and the person who created and entire
rocket company in less than 10 years

will get us to Mars by 2027.

Now you need to know this:

government and robots
no longer control this game.

Private companies are leaping into space

and they will be happy
to take you the Mars.

And that raises a really big question.

Can we actually live there?

Now, NASA may not be able
to get us there until 2040,

or we may get there
a long time before NASA,

but NASA has taken a huge responsibility
in figuring out how we can live on Mars.

Let's look at the problem this way.

Here's what you need to live on Earth:

food, water, shelter and clothing.

And here's what you need to live on Mars:

all of the above, plus oxygen.

So let's look at the most important
thing on this list first.

Water is the basis of all
life as we know it,

and it's far too heavy for us to carry
water from the Earth to Mars to live,

so we have to find water if our life
is going to succeed on Mars.

And if you look at Mars,

it looks really dry,

it looks like the entire
planet it is desert.

But it turns out that it's not.

The soil alone on Mars contains
up to 60 percent water,

and another of orbiters that we still
have flying around Mars has shows us --

and by the way that's
a real photograph --

that lots of craters on Mars have
a sheet of water ice in them.

It's not a bad place to start a colony.

Now here's a view of a little dig
the Phoenix Lander did in 2008,

showing that just below
the surface of the soil is ice --

that white stuff is ice.

In the second picture,

which is four days later
than the first picture,

you can see that
some of it is evaporating.

Orbiters also tell us

that there are huge amounts
of underground water on Mars

as well as glaciers.

In fact,

if only the water ice
at the poles on Mars melted,

most of the planet would be
under 30 feet of water.

So there's plenty of water there,

but most of it's ice,

most of it's underground,

it takes a lot of energy to get it
and a lot of human labor.

This is a device [cooked up] at the
University of Washington back in 1998.

It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier.

And it turns out the Mars atmosphere
is often 100 percent humid.