Elon Musk seems to believe that we – humans – particularly the subset known as Americans – and the smaller subset known as Elon Musk – can and should create a colony of one million people on Mars.

And why not? Raised on the Technocratic wet dreams of his grandfather and perhaps the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein, Musk knows, or rather believes, that there is nothing that man generally and men who are engineers specifically can not do or invent; that there is no problem that we can not solve, including terraforming Mars. After all, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Scotty terraformed planet Genesis – quickly – on Star Trek.

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