Elon Musk Vows To Be Space Age Noah, Launching Starship Arks To Mars

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has vowed to become a Space Age Noah, speeding life across Earth to a second-world sanctuary on Mars aboard his Starship arks (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

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As he counted down toward the picture-perfect 10^th flight test of his Starship super-capsule, SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the world he aims to transform Mars into a fantastical haven for life that now flourishes across the Earth.

During a freewheeling roundtable broadcast this week via the SpaceX website, and the X messaging platform, Musk said one goal in his quest to colonize the Red Planet is to transplant “life as we know it” to a back-up sanctuary.

In the future, SpaceX, as it races to build colossal fleets of Starship arks, aims to lead this crusade to create an off-world refuge before some cosmic cataclysm threatens the home planet, like the gargantuan asteroid that struck the Earth and killed off all but the winged dinosaurs, Musk said while sketching out his masterplan for terraforming Mars.

“We will be landing ships on Mars in the future,” Musk said, “building greenhouses and life on Mars, and ensuring the long term survival of life as we know it.”

In previous projections on his quest to remake Mars as a second foundation for civilization, SpaceX’s chief designer warned that a World War III, escalating to “global thermonuclear warfare,” could fuze a doomsday end to life across Earth.

Now, Elon Musk’s new pledge to preemptively speed the globe’s flora and fauna to a second-world sanctum represents a remarkable philanthropic expansion of his overarching Mars missions.

“It’s a noble goal to want to design and have a system that is able to make human transport beyond Earth possible,” says Sarah Webb, a leading scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, part of the prestigious Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

SpaceX astounded space aficionados around the world this week with the latest demo flight of its Starship, which from the start has been designed to shuttle spacefarers to Mars, Professor Webb tells me in an interview.

After a series of Starship flight tests earlier this year that ended in world-watched pyrotechnic explosions, Webb says, the exquisite splashdown of the SpaceX Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico this week, and the equally precise touchdown of the upper stage capsule in the Indian Ocean, just meters away from the pre-positioned, floating video cameras that filmed the landing, was “a sight to see!”

“It’s a very welcome success of the Starship program,” adds Webb, an astrophysicist and expert on spaceflight who has chronicled Musk’s space odyssey and his trial voyages of the Mars-bound spacecraft.

“This flight was able to deploy dummy satellites as proof of concept and record invaluable amounts of data on the heat shields and other subsystems.”

“The splashdown,” she says, “was a perfect end to this 10th test flight!”

Sporting a NUKE MARS T-shirt, Elon Musk told a cross section of his 224 million followers on X during the webcast that the race is on for SpaceX to lead the transformation of Mars into a twin-planet mirror of Earth’s biosphere.

“We’re aiming for ultimately thousands of ships to be built per year, which is what’s needed in order to construct a city on Mars that is self sustaining.”

At the newly founded SpaceX city Starbase, he said, “The SpaceX team, it’s done an incredible job of building out really the most advanced rocket manufacturing facility that has ever existed.”

“This is far beyond any fabrication facility that has ever been built.”

“This is essentially alien level technology.”

Yet Musk also spun out details on the higher purpose of constructing the first citadel on Mars, depicted in SpaceX computer-generated imagery as being protected inside a super-size crystalline geodesic dome, with human habitats surrounded by Eden-like gardens, all near a semi-circle of spotlighted Starship capsules pointing into the heavens.

Perfecting the next-generation technologies being demoed in Starship, the most advanced and powerful rocket ever designed on this planet, and rendering it completely and rapidly reusable, like a jet that lands and takes off from an airport within minutes, is the key to “building a city on Mars,” Musk said.

“The SpaceX team, which is incredibly talented, will achieve these goals.”

So far, Musk has not outlined how SpaceX will choose the species to be ferried between the planets first, or whether he will surpass Noah by selecting more than “two of every sort” of “every living thing” to bring into the arks.

In an uncanny case of history repeating itself, the massive twin-stage Starship now stands at 400-plus feet, just shy of the 300-cubit length of the ark that Noah was instructed to build.

Yet there will be thousands upon thousands of SpaceX arks in times ahead, all to make way for the genesis of life across a regenerated planet.

With each Starship designed to hold 100 aeronauts, Musk predicts 10,000 flights of the capsule over the course of 20 years will populate this first city with one million human Martians.

These interplanetary nomads will also bring their winged and finned companions.

“It’s important to note here that obviously, we are effectively stewards of life here on Earth,” Musk said, “that the other creatures cannot build spacecraft and get to other planets.”

“So if there were to be a cataclysmic event, like a giant meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs, or ultimately the sun will expand to envelope Earth and destroy all life,” he prophesied, “then if we don’t take life to another planet, life will be destroyed.”

“So it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure long term survival of life as we know it on planet Earth.”

Professor Webb, author of the captivating The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (That Could End the World) says Elon Musk’s prediction of a potential smash-up with a civilization-crushing asteroid is accurate, but that the danger is not believed to be imminent.

NASA and the European Space Agency, she says, are expanding campaigns to “track and monitor asteroids which could be a danger to us, and we’re about to increase those efforts with the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.”

NASA has likewise launched a small DART mission spacecraft, designed as a “kinetic impactor” to crash into and slightly alter the trajectory of a tiny target asteroid, while commissioning studies to blast giant, killer comets and asteroids with nuclear weapons before they can strike the Earth.

Yet Musk’s warning that the sun will one day, after burning through its hydrogen, be transformed into a red giant star that ultimately engulfs the Earth is accurate and unavoidable, Professor Webb adds, although that planet-ending encounter will not come to pass until thousands of centuries into the future.

Any life here that hopes to survive, she adds, must find not just a new planet, but another star system—ideally one that hosts an Earth 2.0.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s creator drew out new details on the overarching goals of his great expedition to settle Mars, and transform human civilization in the process.

“It’s always important to explain the why of things,” he ventured during the roundtable.

“The why of Starship is that we want to be a multi-planet species, to extend consciousness beyond Earth.”

Expanding beyond being a single-globe civilization, he predicted, will speed up human evolution in two major ways.

“If we are a multi-planet species, and ultimately a multi-stellar species out there among the stars, the probability of survival is much, much longer.”

“But then there’s also need for things that are inspiring and exciting and that give you reason to live … and be excited about the future.”

“A future where we are a spacefaring civilization,” he mused, “is infinitely more exciting than one where we are not.”

Transforming Mars, he said, is “the critical stepping stone to get from this solar system to other star systems.”

And on this endless odyssey, he projected, exploring other stars, “perhaps we’ll encounter alien civilizations.”

Meanwhile, Musk recently told followers of his Mars ventures on X that the first Starship flight to the ruddy-colored planet carrying astronauts will likely launch five and one-half years from now.

And in recent days, SpaceX has begun accepting reservations for Mars flights via its website, but without providing fare rates for round-trips between the planets, or guarantees on the timing of the first liftoff.

“Book your flight to travel to Mars,” the inter-world portal reads. “Click Join a Mission below to inquire on mission availability.”