Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size What if life in space felt like life on a Hawaiian island, with the best weather all year long?

Crops growing in fields laid out in bucolic, tropical countryside in an artificial but familiar and comfortable atmosphere, illuminated by our sun? Billionaire Jeff Bezos, of Amazon and Blue Origin fame, foresees this vision for millions, if not billions of humans, into the centuries ahead. Heavy manufacturing, and polluting industries are operated off world, allowing Mother Earth, still inhabited by humans, to return to its Edenic state.

Artist renderings of the space colonies Jeff Bezos wants to build. These were part of a presentation Bezos gave in 2019 discussing Blue Origin’s longer-term plans for space. Credit: Blue Origin Now, imagine another future.

An asteroid approaches Earth at a velocity and size that humanity can’t stop. Its collision with Earth sends up billions of tonnes of debris into the atmosphere, creating an artificial winter that chokes off life as we know it. Humanity on Earth faces extinction.

But thankfully, 225 million kilometres away, humans are living and thriving. On Mars. The red planet has been adapted for human life, through a process called terraforming, which would raise the planet’s temperature and make the atmosphere more hospitable for human life.

Advertisement This is billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s vision for humanity’s interplanetary future. It can be difficult to see, but these are the broader visions – multi-year, multi-decade, and frankly, multi-century – that the two billionaire space entrepreneurs are pursuing. Official SpaceX artist renderings of a colony on Mars involving the Starship rocket.

Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink are further ahead in his race to make humans an interplanetary species, and to “back up” – in the IT sense – humanity. Most of Musk’s businesses (SpaceX, Starlink, even SpaceX-division The Boring Company) contribute in some way to the goal of colonising Mars. Musk was inspired to get into the rocket business in the early 2000s when he learnt that NASA could not put a greenhouse on Mars.

But his fascination with a Mars colony goes back to his youth, when he read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel, Foundation, in which a civilisation is preserved from collapse by finding refuge on a remote planet. Since the early 2000s, his Falcon 9 reusable rockets “have single-handedly transformed the industry”, lowering the cost of launch and altering the economics of putting payloads into space. This venture – and Tesla – have made Musk immensely wealthy, worth an estimated $US342 billion ($538 billion).

Advertisement Musk plans to use revenue from his satellite-based internet service Starlink to fund Starship, the enormous, reusable 100-person rocket to move humans to Mars. In 2019, upon the launch of Starlink’s first operational satellites, Musk was quoted as saying: “We think this is a key stepping stone towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon.” But Musk’s wealth would be only a fraction of what would be needed to get humanity to Mars, a planet where Homo sapiens would need to be sheltered from cosmic rays, provided food and protected from powerful dust storms in an inhospitable atmosphere. New Yorker writer and Harvard history of professor Jill Lepore sees Musk’s involvement with the US government-demolishing DOGE job as a way to support a Mars mission.

“Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are minuscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth,” Lepore says on a podcast. “That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE,” she says, referring to Musk’s radical government cost-cutting program, enabled by US President Donald Trump. Advertisement Starlink is not just a source for eventual funding of Starship but a tool to legitimise Musk’s vision of politics in outer space.

Under its terms and conditions of use, everyone who signs up for Starlink agrees to recognise “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities”, which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says violates the 1967 space treaty that has held the peace in space. A display of space vision or a billionaire’s vanity projects? The SpaceX Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Credit: Bloomberg In this way, people seeking faster internet speeds can be instrumentalised to further erode the standing of a democratic government. Musk has effectively engineered influence through X, putting his money and his social media network at the service of Trump’s 2024 campaign. Likewise, Starlink may serve as a source of political support for his vision of a self-governing Mars colony.

Musk even reportedly bought X (formerly Twitter) “to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work”. So what will life on Mars under Musk’s vision look like? Over a decade ago, he discussed bioengineering a new species better suited to Mars, a planet exposed to the harsh radiation environment of space, the New York Times reported.

Solar panels from Tesla could help heat homes and generate electricity on a planet where temperatures fall as low as minus-153 degrees. People could perhaps live in underground cavities dug out by the boring machines. Perhaps the journey would be impressive.

One SpaceX image shows domed villages and passengers on a future version of Starship taking in a zero-G violin recital for entertainment. In any case, even if he is arguably further along in realising his space vision than rival Bezos, Musk frequently pushes out the timeline for the Mars colony. Advertisement In 2016, Musk said a crew would arrive on Mars as soon as 2024.

In 2022, Musk posted it would be in 2029. This year, he suggested a Tesla robot could be sent to Mars at the end of next year, and if “those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely”. Blue Origin Bezos’ Blue Origin has been less public about deadlines but is equally ambitious, if not aggressive in its development.

Blue Origin has more than 10,000 employees and successfully launched its New Glenn rocket in January. Whose vision of space will come true? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Credit: AP But in the billionaire spacefarers war for attention, Bezos has arguably gained as much notoriety for the celebrity rides on the New Shepard capsule to the edge of atmosphere with space. Most recently, Katy Perry and Gayle King, of Oprah Winfrey-fame, took part in an all-female, mostly celebrity 11-minute ride to the atmosphere’s border with space. Loading Advertisement