7 Things You Need To Know About SpaceX's Plan To Put A Million People On Mars

2. The Problems

If this all sounds too good to be true, it's because it might be.

As with any grand plans, there are hurdles to overcome along the way and, unfortunately, when your plans involve interplanetary travel, the problems scale up accordingly.

The first of these is, understandably, is the limited timeline. Musk wants to get this off the ground in the next four to eight years, and with a deadline that short, there's little room for error. The problem with big thinkers like Musk, is that they have trouble ensuring that the rest of reality keeps up with them. The recent catastrophic failure of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch is proof that they're not immune to setbacks.

The second problem is that, whilst the strategy, funding and hardware are all fairly meticulously thought through, Musk doesn't appear to have thought about how we're going to set ourselves up at the other end. He has made some allusions to terraforming, making the surface of Mars as habitable as Earth, but with no indication as to how, who or at what cost. He appears confident that somebody else will pick up that particular gauntlet, and he might be right, but the chances of getting someone else to work on his breakneck timescale are vanishingly slim.

The third issue is one of ethics. Elon Musk might seem gung-ho about getting boots on the ground but, as far as a lot of the scientific community are concerned, you can't just go rocking up on untouched planets without consideration for the systems you might be contaminating. We have no idea whether life exists on other planets, and sending boatloads of filthy, leaky humans too soon might scupper our chances of ever finding out.

This is all very depressing, but don't let it get you down, because it coudl be that things are about to get very exciting.