We Don't Need To Go To Mars (Yet)

A colony on the Red Planet isn’t the solution we need.

- Koh Wanzi

The heady winds of technological progress are quite irresistible. This past September, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared a major update on his plans to colonize Mars at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia.

It was meant as a follow-up to a previous talk he gave at 2016’s IAC conference in Mexico, where he first unveiled the Interplanetary Transport System, or as Musk likes to playfully call it, the Big F**king Rocket (BFR).

The latter name is fun, but it underscores the outsized proportions of Musk’s ambitions, and those of many of his Silicon Valley peers. The BFR moniker sounds blissfully simple and easily grasped by the general public, but it also sounds pretty crazy, and that’s the problem with many of Musk’s grand schemes.