Elon Musk’s Dream of Sending a Million People to Mars Meets a Nobel Laureate’s Warning: ‘We Do Not Have a Planet B'

Elon Musk’s ambition to establish a self-sustaining civilization of one million people on Mars faces skepticism from Nobel Prize-winning astronomer Michel Mayor, who argues that the planet’s hostile conditions make mass migration unrealistic and humanity must prioritize protecting Earth.

Nobel Laureate Challenges Musk’s Million-Person Mars Vision

"We do not have a Planet B. We have to take care of Earth," Mayor told delegates at the Starmus science festival in Tenerife, Spain, on Wednesday, challenging the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) founder’s vision of making humanity multiplanetary.

"Could one million persons migrate to Mars in the next century?" Mayor asked, highlighting its thin atmosphere, freezing temperatures, radiation exposure and toxic soil. "The pressure on Mars is something like one hundredth of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s carbon dioxide, argon, but no oxygen. So it’s absolutely not convenient for man," he said.

NASA’s research on Martian conditions supports those concerns, identifying surface temperatures reaching minus 153 degrees Celsius and radiation exposure roughly 40–50 times Earth’s levels. Mayor argued that settlers would require pressurized structures or underground habitats to survive.

SpaceX Pursues Ambitious Plans For Martian Settlement

SpaceX’s published Mars roadmap envisions transporting more than one million settlers and millions of tonnes of cargo using reusable Starship spacecraft. Musk previously outlined plans to dramatically increase Starship launches, targeting more than 30 daily missions by 2030.

He also reaffirmed his commitment to Mars despite SpaceX’s growing focus on lunar exploration. The company’s current roadmap schedules initial Martian cargo missions no earlier than 2028.

Exoplanet Pioneer Warns Against Abandoning Earth

Mayor shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Didier Queloz for discovering 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star, in 1995. Despite that groundbreaking discovery, Mayor dismissed distant planets as viable alternatives to Earth.

"We have to keep in mind the physics," he said, explaining that reaching a potentially habitable planet 30 light-years away using Apollo-era spacecraft speeds would take millions of years. His warning contrasts with Musk’s vision of making interplanetary travel accessible to ordinary people. Mayor maintained that humanity cannot depend on distant worlds for survival.

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