Elon Musk's mission to colonise Mars will 'ruin the planet,' top scientist warns

A scientist has spoken about Elon Musk’s ambitions to colonise Mars – and he had a stark warning for the future of space exploration.

It comes after Musk announced that the first SpaceX missions to Mars aboard the next-generation Starship rocket are planned for 2026. He also said that he believes more than a million people could live on the Red Planet within the next 30 years.

Writing on Twitter/X, Musk said: “If civilization is reasonably stable for the next ~30 years, a self-sustaining city of a million+ people will be built on Mars.”

Responding to the claims, Professor Andrew Coates spoke about the prospect of humans on Mars and argued that it could contaminate the planet and threaten space exploration in the future.

Professor Coates, who is a physicist from UCL, told the BBC's 'Today Programme': “The last thing we need to be doing is taking life from Earth to Mars. Robotic exploration is the way to go.”

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He added: “Eventually Elon Musk would like to be taking people to the moon and potentially onto Mars but I think we have to be a bit careful with the latter one.

“We have to be very careful in the way we prepare missions, doing lots of cleaning of the technology, to make sure we're not taking life to Mars and measuring that. That's the last thing we want to do.”

It comes after the director of I, Robot accused Musk of copying his robot design for the new Tesla Optimus robot.

As well as unveiling the Tesla Cybercab robot vehicle recently, billionaire tech mogul Musk has been demonstrating more new tech with a glimpse of the Tesla robot, Optimus.

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