Elon Musk Rejects Peter Thiel’s Interpretation and Explains How Mars Reduces the Risk of Consciousness Disappearing

Elon Musk Rejects Peter Thiel’s Interpretation and Explains How Mars Reduces the Risk of Consciousness Disappearing

On 25 July, Elon Musk responded to Peter Thiel’s account of the motives behind the Mars project. According to Musk, political conflict on Earth does not explain his interest in Mars. His aim is to distribute risk across multiple planets.

French entrepreneur Brivaël Le Pogam recounted a conversation with Thiel, who attributed Musk’s desire to reach Mars to the culture war on Earth. Musk disagreed in a response posted on 25 July.

“In this case, Peter is wrong about me.”

As long as humans live on a single planet, any catastrophe affecting the whole Earth threatens all of human civilization. Musk argues that a self-sufficient settlement on Mars would use physical distance to isolate part of humanity from a crisis on Earth.

In his model, distance provides time. A direct journey to Mars usually takes seven to ten months. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a signal takes between four and twenty minutes to travel from one planet to the other. Musk proposes that the months required for travel would create a quarantine barrier during a deadly pandemic, while the signal delay would provide time to stop a computer virus or an artificial intelligence attack before it reached Mars.

Mission planners are already exploring ways to use these months. The Space Biostasis Coalition proposes reversibly slowing metabolism during the journey to Mars. Musk assigns a different role to the same distance. It should prevent a single crisis on Earth from destroying both settlements at once.

This reasoning depends on the creation of a city that can survive without continuous support from Earth. SpaceX describes this goal for Mars as a settlement with more than one million residents, millions of tons of cargo, and several thousand Starship spacecraft. The company plans its first cargo missions to the Martian surface for 2028 or later.

Musk extends this reasoning beyond Mars. In his account, Mars is one step toward spreading consciousness throughout the Solar System and eventually among millions of stars.

Musk ranks his personal interest in space exploration above reducing the risk that consciousness will disappear. He is more strongly drawn to the prospect of life among the stars and the possibility of encountering other life or traces of a civilization that died long ago.