Elon Musk wants to send settlers to colonize Mars.
He said they’ll ultimately have to terraform the planet, but first, they’ll live in glass domes.
Now, I’ve never been one to trivialize big ideas. Particularly from Musk.
What he’s done in terms of launching a transition away from the outdated internal combustion engine is truly amazing.
And his reusable rocket?
The implications of that technology will absolutely change the world.
But when it comes to Musk’s big plans for Mars, I have to call bullshit.
And also…
What the Hell Is Terraforming?
As reported in The Independent, terraforming in this instance is a process that is believed would make Mars more habitable for human life:
This involves blasting the planet with nuclear weapons at its poles to cause the ice caps to melt and induce accelerated warming to make it comfortable for humans to live there.
Musk said, “Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. There’s a fast way and a slow way. The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”
He also suggested “a system of giant mirrors could be placed in orbit around Mars in order to reflect sunlight onto the surface.”
No one has a price tag for any of this, by the way, but we do know that, according to Musk, it will cost $500,000 to send a single person to Mars.
And if Musk is trying to get 1 million humans to the red planet, you’re looking at $500 billion.
And for what?
Why would we spend a half-trillion dollars to send people to Mars?
Well, according to Musk, we must colonize Mars to preserve our species after a third world war.
Seriously?
I don’t know about you, but that seems like an awful lot of money to spend to preserve a species that put itself in this precarious situation to begin with.
Perhaps we should really ask ourselves if our species is even worth preserving at all…
And if it is, maybe we should table the Mars colonization thing for a bit while we figure out how to ensure our survival on this planet. It’s not that we don’t have the tools, intelligence, and resources to make that happen.
I imagine that with a half-trillion dollars to spend, we could make some pretty meaningful inroads into ensuring our survival for a very long time — right here on Earth.
Certainly the ROI would be a lot higher.
Look, I’m not trying to trivialize the value of Musk’s ability to make the impossible, well, possible.
What he did with Tesla and SpaceX is truly inspirational and has made a lot of people very, very rich.
But I would never invest in some fakakta plan to put a million people on Mars. It’s stupid and a giant waste of money and resources.
What isn’t stupid, however, is something Musk recently mentioned about a new energy technology that he says will be much bigger than anything he’s accomplished with electric cars.
And that’s a pretty bold statement to make when you consider Tesla is solely responsible for launching the electric car revolution.
Today, nearly every major automaker has dozens of new electric cars in development or on the roads. And that all started after Musk showed that electric cars didn’t have to be glorified golf carts and, of course, people would buy them.
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But this new technology he’s talking about has nothing to do with electric cars. In fact, Musk said this technology will not only dwarf what we’ve seen with the electric car, but the market will grow much, much faster.
So what is it?
And why is he so bullish on it?
Well, it is pretty incredible.
It’s a new energy technology that can power the 90 million-plus buildings and homes in the U.S. alone — and do it more cheaply than any fossil fuel or other renewable energy technology currently on the market.
So cheap, in fact, it can do it for virtually nothing — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Apple already has $3 billion invested in a version of this technology, and Facebook is ponying up $416 million.
Bottom line: Unless you hate money, you need to learn everything you can about this technology now, and that includes the name of the company producing it and, of course, its stock symbol.
You can get access to all this information in this recent investor note.
There’s also a special report that outlines this technology, who invented it, and how much it’s worth. That report can be downloaded here.
I know it’s Thanksgiving, and not a lot of folks are thinking about investing right now.
But I am.
And given the potential of this new technology that Elon Musk is salivating over, I’d be a fool not to.
To a new way of life and a new generation of wealth…
Jeff Siegel
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Jeff is the founder and managing editor of Green Chip Stocks. For more on Jeff, go to his editor’s page.
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