With every passing day, we get a little closer to the reality of inhabiting planet Mars, thanks to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Naturally, questions arise, and anyone with a Twitter account can post the question in the Twitterverse. And if you’re lucky, Elon Musk might himself answer you.
On November 18, a user named ‘Astronomiaum’ asked Musk, “When people arrived on Mars, would the planet already be terraformed or would people have another way created by SpaceX to survive on the red planet?”
His tweet was met with a response by Musk himself. He wrote, “Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth.”
In his reply, Musk also talks about terraforming, the hypothetical process of altering the atmosphere and physical features of the moon or any other planet to make it habitable. But in a statement in July 2018, NASA had stated that Mars terraforming is not possible using present-day technology.
“Mars does not retain enough carbon dioxide that could practically be put back into the atmosphere to warm Mars, according to a new NASA-sponsored study. Transforming the inhospitable Martian environment into a place astronauts could explore without life support is not possible without technology well beyond today’s capabilities,” NASA said in their statement.
