I want to write something about Elon’s companies for a long time. In 2020, I finally find some time to write my think of his bussiness. SpaceX successfully launched a new batch of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit today (April 22, 2020) and nailed a rocket landing at sea to cap the mission.

Could we go to the Mars by 2024?

The answer is no. According to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world needs more time to recover from the disease, we need time to develop useful vaccines to make sure our human being will still stand on the earth. To the mars is like to the moon, but what we want more is to build a base on the mars. I know NASA start its plan to return the moon and build a base in last year.

Although Musk has a big Aerospace company, he still needs more time and effort to make the trip come true.

The health and food problem will always with humans wherever we are. He needs to solve the problems to copy the minimal living system from earth to mars. He couldn’t do all the things without the help from biomedical scientists like me ;)

Will we build on-ground city/base on Mars?

I am not sure if the geographical environments of Mars are good enough to build a city, but I know musk try to build the tunnel to connect big cities in US. It is a boring thing on earth. But might be a good idea to build tunnels or underground cites on Mars if there are not so many “marsquake”. The underground city may better that on-ground city, if the environments are not as good as on earth. But we all know there is no extreme weather on Mars except freeze temperature and thin air, the on-ground city is always the cheapest choice for us.

Farther away from the sun, more energy you need

Musk owns an electric vehicle company – Tesla, and a subsidiary of Tesla – SolarCity. It is always a great idea for using solar energy instead of oil. But consider the oil price, we may still using oil as major energy for a long time. How about mars? The temperature is so cold which means battery may not work under this condition, but Solar panels could. I think SolarCity maybe more meaningful than the Tesla for the purpose of Ad Astra.

There is little information about these two companies. I have a deep concern about AI, will the true world be replaced by AI robot, will we transplant some micro-chip in heads? The artificial intelligence could create more cheating illusions, to figure out which is true which isn’t would be more and more difficult. It will cause conflict between countries.