Joining the Thrillionaires 321
When people have begun living on Mars, SpaceX will
build a large cruiser that will travel between Earth and
Mars, most likely called the Mars Colonial Transporter. The
cruiser will never land on any plant, so to get to the surface,
a smaller craft will come and pick you up from the cruiser.
“It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there
slowly, with optimal energy cost,” Elon said. “Then it would
take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it
would take six months to get back, though I can see getting
the travel time down to three months pretty quickly.”^278 In
comparison, it took a sailing ship more than nine weeks to
cross the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, but it took the
Concorde only three hours in the 21st century.^13
When both the price and the time of the journey
to Mars decreased, more volunteers will be motivated to
emigrate from Earth. Elon argued that if you can reduce the
cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class
home in California, or around half a million dollars, then
enough people would buy a ticket and immigrate to Mars.
“You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and
adventure,” Elon said. “But there are seven billion people on
Earth now, and there will be probably eight billion by the
midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people
decided to do that, that’s still 8 000 people. And I think
probably more than one in a million people will decide to
do that.”^288
To help mankind become multi-planetary, the first step
is to colonize Mars, but Elon has larger plans. “Having
a base on Mars, where there is a lot of travel to and