Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seek to conquer space, which now seems really close at hand. Mathematical science supports the vision: 110 colonists are enough to colonize the Red Planet. But the conquest of the new frontier is not just achieving a dream: it is also a private matter for the super rich.
In the 1960s, extraterrestrials were generally called Martians, as Mars seemed so far away and so unreachable. Today, colonizing it is no longer a matter of science fiction, but a goal that Elon Musk vows to achieve with his SpaceX.
The company's mission is known and revolves around three cornerstones: the "Starlink" project, which in 2020 alone launched 953 satellites for broadband Internet access thanks to the Falcon9 vector, plus the 143 sent into orbit at the beginning of 2021 with a single launch (record!). Then there's "Launch America," the appointment with history: the United States returns to fly with an American spacecraft, the Crew Dragon. Finally, the famous "Starship" mission to reach the Moon, but above all Mars, where Musk swears he will move.
The conspiracy theorists (but perhaps not so much) are convinced that this latest mission by the multi-billionaire inventor of Tesla is due to the awareness that humanity's struggle against climate change is already lost. And he can look for a way off of the planet Earth. Musk seasoned it with poetry: “It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
From dreams, however, we are already at the feasibility studies. If we ever became a multi-planet species, how many colonists would it take to survive elsewhere?
The number is revealed by Jean-Marc Salotti of Bordeaux Institut National Polytechnique, author of "The Minimum Number of Settlers for Survival on Another Planet, in Scientific Reports and taken from Nature: "A mathematical model can be used to determine the minimum number of colonists and the way of life to survive on another planet," writes Salotti. "And the result is 110 individuals."