Elon Musk says a lot of things. Much of what he says is just vile bigotry or outright lies, but you can’t deny that he is a man of many words. On Saturday evening, he hopped on Twitter to say more words, this time about his plan to send a crewed space flight to Mars. And, well, they sure were some words. Apparently, if unmanned tests go well in 2026, SpaceX will have people headed to Mars in just four years.
In true Musk fashion, we got this information in response to a Bill Ackman quote tweet of a post showing a new RFK Jr. ad that read, “Let’a [sic] make America healthy again! Without our health and that of our children, we have nothing. And for those who care about our economy, national debt, and deficits, there is no more important initiative.” For some reason, Musk thought that had something to do with Mars and jumped in:
“It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.” Yeah, man. Just make the technology 10,000 times better, and then we can move to Mars, and that will make our children healthier? Is that it? Sadly, there’s no time to dwell on Elon’s thought process here because then we get to the bigger stuff:
According to Musk, he’ll be sending the first SpaceX Starships to Mars in 2026, and if they can land and return safely, then in four years, astronauts will be strapped into a rocket and headed to Mars for their first mission. On the one hand, that would be rad as hell, but on the other hand, does anybody really believe that’s going to happen? SpaceX sending one rocket to Mars sounds plausible, but come on. It’s Elon Musk. If the man has ever once hits a deadline in his life, it’ll be newsworthy.
It gets even more unbelievable from there, too:
Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.
Um…what? The idea that it would only take 20 years to build a self-sustaining city on Mars is so ridiculous, it’s hard to even know where to start. So conveniently, he threw in the line about how “we will no longer have all our egge, literally and metabolically, on one planet.” He definitely meant “metaphorically” there, right? There’s no way. There’s just no way. Assuming he did mean “metaphorically,” you have to wonder why he types “metabolically” frequently enough for his autocorrect to assume that’s what he meant.
And if he really did mean “metaphorically,” I’m going to need him to explain which eggs are literal and which ones are metaphorical. Because, while he could very well mean they’ll raise chickens on Mars, but come on. This is Elon Musk. We know about his creepy birthing obsession. You just know he’d say something about how women are “breeding stock” and “incubators of humanity.” Gross.
Actually, if he actually did mean “metabolically,” the explanation also probably comes with gross thoughts on women, only from a much darker, seedier part of the internet that I have no interest in learning about. Sadly, if JD Vance becomes Vice President, there’s a good chance that won’t be possible.