Life on Mars for Real

Genesis 8:22
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

Elon Musk, the founder of commercial spacecraft company SpaceX, has expressed a wish to put a city on Mars of at least a million citizens. Though the technological challenges involved in such an undertaking would be immense, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. I remember a short story by Isaac Asimov, in which colonists were able to meet their water supply needs, by finding a large icy asteroid, and towing to the Red Planet, storing it at the planet’s North Pole. Musk envisages a “self-sustaining city on Mars” and suggests that a million inhabitants within 100 years is the minimum that would be required to achieve this goal.

He is serious about the endeavor, even to the extent of deliberately saving up his own money to finance such a trip. His reason for so doing is that he expects the Earth to become uninhabitable very soon, because of man-made disasters, such as his belief in Climate Change.

I see nothing wrong with attempting to set up self-sustaining colonies on Mars, but I do not expect the Earth to be destroyed by human activities. It is only God, who can (and will) bring this world to an end. Musk’s dystopian vision is understandable, given the current spiritual opinions of Western countries. As the Christian songwriter, Graham Kendrick, sang:

Choices crowd his heavy senses
Keeping up the old defenses
Oh but he knows how it feels to be dying inside
Is there life on Earth?

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, for the ingenuity and talents of men and women, who push back the frontiers of engineering ability. Though they may not acknowledge it, their talents come from You, and we praise You for them. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Elon Musk: We’ll create a city on Mars with a million inhabitants, , accessed 6/22/2017
Image: Adobe Stock, licensed to author