Abstract
As Curiosity, the $2.5 billion Mini Cooper-sized Mars rover, touched down on the Red Planet on August 3, 2012, Elon Musk was already planning the next logical step – sending humans there. As with all of Musk’s space plans, his goal was not short on ambition. The Mars Messiah is not interested in merely ferrying people to Mars; Musk wants to make it possible for people to live there. Permanently. Musk acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges of colonizing the Red Planet is making the trip affordable, suggesting a round-trip ticket price should be around half a million dollars. It is a bold plan, but ‘bold’ is an appropriate moniker for the man who created PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX.
“Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is ‘Are we on the path to becoming a multi-planet species or not?’ And if we’re not, that’s not a very bright future; we’ll simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us.”
Elon Musk, speaking at a conference held on August 2, 2011, by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
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- 1.
Oxidative stress is a term that describes the imbalance between the production of free radicals and the ability of the body to neutralize these free radicals using antioxidants. Free radicals are molecules that contain oxygen. These molecules have one or more unpaired electrons, which means they are very reactive with other molecules, which in turn means they are capable of chemically interacting with and destabilizing cells such as DNA. Under normal conditions, antioxidants prevent these reactions.
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Seedhouse, E. (2022). Red Risks. In: SpaceX. Springer Praxis Books(). Praxis, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99181-4_8
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