Business
Column: Elon Musk's dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars
The image of Elon Musk that may be dominating people’s mindspace at the moment is of his prancing about joyously — and, yes, a tad weirdly — behind Donald Trump on the podium during the latter’s Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pa.
But how many people noticed the clue to Musk’s worldview on display at the event? For visible under his jacket was a T-shirt bearing the legend, “Occupy Mars.”
That’s a pointer to one of Musk’s most dearly held goals, which is to populate Mars with humans, transported to the Red Planet presumably by Musk’s rocketship company SpaceX. Musk has been airing this idea for years, even a decade or more. His mantra, as he tweeted as recently as a few weeks ago, is that “becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.”
Outer space seems designed to kill us.
— Scientific American
Musk brings up the idea of colonizing Mars so often that it can properly be regarded as a whim of iron. It’s a whim because he plainly hasn’t pondered soberly the obstacles in the way.
The technical challenges of sending a spacecraft to Mars, the distance to which from Earth averages about 140 million miles, are plainly the least difficult, since we’ve already done it: NASA landed the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in January 2004.
Spirit functioned for five years, sending telemetry back to Earth from its five-mile range; Opportunity ranged over 28 miles of the Martian landscape for an amazing 15 years (its fascinating and endearing life story is told by “Good Night Oppy,” a documentary streaming on Amazon Prime).
All the other challenges are harder, and many are not amenable to human ingenuity at this stage. They’re financial, biological and psychological — and also technical, when the question is not how to get to Mars but how humans can function and survive once we’re there, much less establish a permanent presence.
Musk’s timeline for colonizing Mars has shifted constantly since he began bringing it up. Last month he announced that the first Mars-bound Starships would launch (unmanned) in two years, when Mars and Earth come to their nearest approach, as they do every 26 months or so.
If the landings succeed, the first crewed missions would take place two years later. Further flights, he said, would fulfill the goal of building a “self-sustaining city in about 20 years.”
Yet he also has talked about sending 1 million human colonists for that self-sustaining city in Mars by 2050, a mere 24 years after the first manned touchdown. In 2020 he posited building a fleet of 100 Starships every year for 10 years, parking them and their passengers in Earth orbit to await the next Earth-Mars near approach.
Such pronouncements have often elicited credulous reactions from Musk’s interviewers. They should know by now, however, that taking them at face value is the wrong way to bet.
Musk is notorious for the unreliability of his timing and engineering forecasts. While his words are taken as gospel by his fan base, many in the automotive and high-tech communities have learned from bitter experience not to trust them. It’s proper to ask whether he has ever met a self-imposed deadline for bringing out a new product or feature or fulfilled his claims for their capabilities.
The freshest example was his Oct. 10 unveiling of prototypical self-driving taxis and vans amid claims that his EV company Tesla would have fully autonomous vehicles on the road next year. Tesla shares fell nearly 9% the next day, thanks to world-weary investors who had heard such overcooked claims from him before. (A prototype humanoid robot introduced at the same event and implied to operate autonomously was later revealed to be human-assisted.)
If Musk can’t meet deadlines a few years off, then, why would anyone buy projections dated a quarter-century into the future?
Fancies about interplanetary travel may have their sedulous followers, but skepticism about Musk’s Martian fantasy have been mounting. Last month, the Wall Street Journal did the math on the 26-month cycle in which the Earth and Mars approach each other close enough to make travel between them practical, and reported that Musk’s timeline for Mars settlement was unlikely within his lifetime. (He’s 53.)
As for the other obstacles, they’re legion. One is the question of who would pay for the project. As rich as he is — he is often described as the richest or second-richest person on Earth, with a fortune estimated at $195 billion — he doesn’t have the resources to go it alone.
Indeed, without its billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts, SpaceX would be going nowhere fast, even in Earth orbit. But whether the U.S. would have the political will or fiscal capacity to mount a project estimated to cost $1 quadrillion (that’s 1,000 trillions) is doubtful in the extreme even if spread out over several decades.
Space aficionados often compare the drive to explore other worlds to the impulse that sent humans on voyages around the world, depicting our forebears’ curiosity about our own planet as an innate curiosity that defines us as an alpha species. It’s comforting to think of ourselves that way, but more than a little pompous.
The truth is that the chief impulse that sent Europeans around the world was commercial. The Spanish came to the New World in search of gold, Russians for pelts, others for spices, raw materials, fishing grounds, etc., etc. They spent fortunes in these efforts, but they were willing to invest on the expectation of a healthy financial return.
Human interplanetary exploration will be more dangerous and more costly, especially if robots can do the work, and the lack of a discernible economic return a greater obstacle. “We haven’t even colonized the Sahara Desert, the bottom of the oceans or the moon, because it makes no economic sense,” the physician Danielle Teller observed nearly a decade ago. “It would be far, far easier and cheaper to ‘terraform’ the deserts on our own planet than to terraform Mars. Yet we can’t afford it.”
NASA estimates the length of a voyage to Mars as at least nine months, during which the passengers would be bombarded by radiation and their bodies warped by weightlessness and by Martian gravity, which is 38% that of Earth. It may not be a survivable journey.
“Outer space seems designed to kill us,” Scientific American observed last year. “Humans evolved for and adapted to conditions on Earth. Move us off our planet, and we start to fail — physically and psychologically. The cancer risk from cosmic rays and the problems that human bodies experience in microgravity could be deal-breakers.”
Astronauts on the International Space Station, where the stays have typically been six months or less (a few record breakers have approached or exceeded one year), were known to have experienced weightlessness-associated visual impairments due to changes in the eye that were “not fully reversible upon return to Earth,” according to a 2018 study.
What would the colonists find upon arrival?
They would encounter a barren landscape without water or breathable atmosphere, bathed in deadly solar and galactic radiation from which Earthbound humans are protected by our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Food, water and other resources would have to be shipped from home, at distances that make the supply frighteningly undependable. They would have to live underground, adding to psychological disorientation compounded by their sheer remoteness; they would be the first humans who were living beyond a view of Earth itself.
Mars is more inhospitable to human occupation than the most punishing terrestrial environments, such as Antarctica and the remote desert. Its average surface temperature is minus 85 degrees, and can fall as low as minus 225 degrees.
Then there are the psychological pressures of underground life hopelessly far from home. An oft-mentioned cautionary tale is the experience of Biosphere 2, in which eight volunteers — four men and four women — were sealed in a futuristic glass structure in Arizona from 1991 to 1993 as an experiment in remote self-sustained living.
They raised crops and domestic animals for food and enjoyed their lifestyle, until “the human element” intervened, as one of the subjects wrote later. “We contracted a syndrome psychologists call irrational antagonism. That is, we split into two groups of four. A power struggle over the project’s direction made things much worse.” Their oxygen supply dwindled, producing a syndrome resembling altitude sickness, due to a miscalculation about photosynthesis.
They had encountered an age-old phenomenon common in insular communities cut off from home. The leader of the 19th century California utopian community Kaweah put it into words: His people “divided into factions, and fractions of factions,” he wrote. “Otherwise good people seem to take a delight in finding flaws in their neighbors.”
It may be that technological advances will eventually overcome these obstacles. But it’s also true that human ingenuity already has produced a solution to some of the most pressing: robots. For what Spirit and Opportunity proved is that there’s little of value that humans can do in deep space that robots can’t do as well, or better.
The ultimate question about Musk’s project is why? His vision seems to have been formed at the age when adolescents become enthralled by science fiction movies set in faraway galaxies — which isn’t to say that they can remain entertaining for adults, too.
But for him, reality is a distraction. For less than the stupendous cost of colonizing Mars, humanity could address the issues that Musk feels will make the Earth uninhabitable, such as global warming. Leaving an Earth warmer by 2 degrees centigrade for Mars “would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump,” Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote in their 2023 book, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?”
Good question. Musk plainly hasn’t thought it through, at least not enough to avoid dismissing the challenges with hand-waving. But we can. Our imperative is to fix the home we live in before setting forth to ruin another one.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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