Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks big non-technical hurdles

Perhaps the biggest danger is that Musk's vision of colonizing Mars looks too much like a disposable Earth philosophy - we've messed up this planet, so time to move on to the next

Elon Musk has a plan, and it’s about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they’ll send a duo of supply ships to the red planet within five years. By 2024, they’re aiming to send the first humans. From there they have visions of building a space port, a city and, ultimately, a planet they’d like to “geoengineer” to be as welcoming as a second Earth.

If he succeeds, Musk could thoroughly transform our relationship with