Dramatic new discovery on Mars shatters Elon Musk's plans for red planet: 'Dangerous illusion'
The billionaire has long held radical plans for our planetary neighbour, even saying that he wanted to die there. But a recent find has disrupted his vision.
The mystery of Mars’ missing water has been solved. And it’s another blow to Elon Musk’s explosive dreams of turning the red planet green, described by one academic as a "dangerous illusion".
NASA’s Insight lander carried a seismic sensor to the surface of Mars in 2018. Geophysicists have since been scouring the ultrasound-like results to figure out what’s going on beneath its surface. And now they think they know.
They’ve struck water. A lot of it. Enough to cover the entire planet with a 2km-deep ocean. But there’s a catch.
According to a new study, it’s all trapped in fissures and pores between 11km and 20km beneath the planet’s surface.
And that may throw cold water on controversial billionaire Elon Musk’s dream to “terraform” the planet (make it habitable).
He first detailed his idea to detonate nuclear warheads above the north and south poles in 2015. This, he believes, will vaporise the frozen CO2 and water there – turning it into an instant atmosphere.
Astrophysicists, however, insist his dreams don’t fit the reality.
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Then, in 2017, the controversial billionaire outlined to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide how he plans to use his enormous Starship SpaceX rocket (first successfully tested earlier this year) to form the basis of an Earth-Mars “economy”.
Even if the radical idea works, there’s not enough CO2 to create a functional heat-retaining atmosphere (Mars’ atmosphere density is just one per cent that of Earth’s). And there’s not enough frozen ice in the poles to get a planetary water cycle flowing again.
“Billions of years ago, water flowed in Martian lakes, rivers, and possibly even an ocean,” says Planetary Society’s Asa Stahl.
“Then something happened to dry the planet and leave its surface the way we see it today: icy, but perhaps without a single drop of stable liquid water.”
Some argue the water evaporated into space about three billion years ago because Mars didn’t have enough of an atmosphere to hold it in. Others believed it’s still there. Somewhere.
NASA’s Mars Insight probe used Mars quakes – some reaching up to magnitude five – along with the shock of impacts from meteors and volcanic stirrings as a source of seismic sound waves.
Different materials absorb and reflect different sound levels in different ways. The data it recorded offers a means of “imaging” the planet’s interior.
“The mission greatly exceeded my expectations,” says University of Berkeley planetary science professor Michael Manga.
“From looking at all the seismic data that Insight collected, they’ve figured out the thickness of the crust, the depth of the core, the composition of the core, even a little bit about the temperature within the mantle.”
Sensors show water is deep below the surface
But Insight’s seismic sensors seem to show there are no lakes of water-ice sitting just beneath Mars’ surface. Its earliest results found nothing of significance in the upper 5km of Mars’ crust.
Now it’s revealed there is water down there – just far beyond the reach of even Musk’s Boring drilling company.
“This reservoir could have percolated down through nooks and crannies billions of years ago, only stopping at huge depths where the pressure would seal off any cracks,” says Stahl.
“The same process happens on our planet – but unlike Mars, Earth’s plate tectonics cycles this water back up to the surface.”
A lack of easily accessible water could bring Musk’s dreams of putting 1 million people on Mars by 2044 on ice. Last year, he said he could land an uncrewed Starship on the surface of Mars within four years.
Musk's Mars dream slammed by scientists
According to a recent report in the New York Times, Musk has instructed his SpaceX employees to begin in-depth conceptual designs for a Martian city.
But his critics argue science and technology are as yet nowhere near solving the fundamental challenges of sustaining human life in such a hostile environment.
Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees told the House of Lords in March that Musk’s Mars colony dream was unrealistic.
“The idea of mass migration to avoid the Earth’s problems, which he (Musk) and a few other space enthusiasts adopt, that I think is a dangerous illusion,” he said.
Meanwhile, Musk continues to insist he wants to die on Mars.
If he ever gets there, chances are he will. More than 60 per cent of all attempts just to land on the Red Planet have failed - catastrophically.
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