SpaceX founder Elon Musk wants a city of one million people on Mars by 2050. This goal may seem very ambitious, given that humans have not yet set foot on the surface of the Red Planet.. But is it possible? And how long will it take to colonize other planets in the solar system? The answers to these questions are provided by the publication Live Science.

It is noted that in many respects it all depends on what kind of planet we are talking about.. If it’s about Mars, then for him, time frames in decades do not seem unattainable. Serkan Saidam, Associate Director of the Australian Center for Space Research and Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said that human colonization of Mars is possible in the coming decades..

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“I believe that by 2050 we will have a human colony on Mars,” he said..

According to Saidam, one of the first steps to make a human mission to Mars a success will be to find water.. It can be extracted from ice or hydrated minerals. The discovery of water will allow food to be grown on the Red Planet, similar to what was shown in the movie " Minerals can also be used as energy sources for rocket fuel.

But there is no scientific consensus on the colonization of Mars. Other scholars are much more cautious.. Louis Friedman, an astronaut engineer and co-founder of The Planetary Society, a non-profit organization, suggested in a 2019 conversation with Gizmodo that colonization of the Red Planet is unlikely in the foreseeable future.. Rachel Seidler, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida who has worked with NASA astronauts, says people like optimistic scenarios for Mars colonization, but it sounds "

However, humanity is likely to reach the Red Planet in the coming decades.. China plans to send human missions to Mars in 2033, and NASA - by the end of the 2030s or early 2040s.

Once humans are on the Red Planet, the next step is to build a colony.

Colonization implies a certain degree of autonomy, but does not imply complete independence. Saidam compares Mars with an island where you need to import something at certain intervals.

The red planet will also have to produce something in order to be financially self-sustaining.. One possibility could be space tourism, but according to Saidam, mining is more promising..

Although Mars is the most realistic option for colonization, the Red Planet is not very suitable for human life.. The atmosphere of Mars is over 95% carbon dioxide.; it is very cold here, the average temperature is about minus - 60 degrees Celsius; spacecraft take about 8.5 months to get to Earth;

and it's bombarded with harmful radiation.

More hospitable are exoplanets - worlds outside our solar system. But the problem is that they are very far away, until we could even send a device to an exoplanet.. And it took Voyager 35 and 41 years to leave our planetary system.. Planets around other stars are much further away..

At the same time, scientists hope that in the near future we will be able to reach them thanks to the creation of faster spacecraft..