Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who co-founded Tesla Motors and Paypal, has been doing some serious planning for his next big venture: his future dominion on Mars. That’s right, Musk has called Newt Gingrich’s moon colony and raised the politician, oh, 35 million miles. He’s not the first entrepreneur to buy a plot of land to mold as his very own—remember the “breastaurateur” who bought a whole town and renamed it Bikinis?—but this Musk fellow, he dreams big: his Mars colony, a city inside a giant pressurized bubble, will house around 80,000 people, perhaps making it No. 1 on the list of most outrageous plans for cities of the future. The territory’s first 10 colonizers would need thousands of pounds of construction materials and machinery, which seems to be a wee bit of an undertaking, considering it took eight years and $2.5 billion for NASA to land Curiosity Rover. The whole plan is estimated to cost around $36B, which, as Gizmodo points out, “actually sounds like a bargain, considering there is currently no way to support life on Mars.” Is the guy crazy? Well, yes and no. Sure, his plans are largely impossible to obtain in his lifetime, but, come on, he’s a wildly wealth entrepreneur, if you can’t dream big after you’ve made your billions, then what’s the point?
· Huge Mars Colony Eyed by Spacex Founder [Discovery via Gizmodo]