#35
How will you build a self-sustaining city on Mars?
Interviews
4
Answers
5
X posts
2
Span
2023 to 2025
First asked Oct 31, 2023, most recently Jul 27, 2025. Excerpts below are from machine transcripts with filler words (um, uh, you know) and stutters removed; … marks a cut. They are not checked word for word, so use the link to hear the exact words, or the transcript link for the raw text. Timestamps: 1 cross-checked against YouTube captions, 4 from the archive transcript only. X has no link-to-time option, so X links open at the start.
How the answer evolved · oldest first
Oct 31, 2023 · The Joe Rogan Experience · asked by Joe Rogan
Q: Like what are you planning on doing to make it habitable?
Well, at first you would have to have a life support system because Mars has a low density atmosphere, only about 1% the density of Earth, and it's primarily CO2. Now, over time, you can terraform Mars. Terraform means make it like Earth, essentially. And if you warm Mars up, you will. There's a bunch of frozen CO2 that will evaporate, densify the atmosphere. And you'd actually want kind of global warming on Mars …
Apr 8, 2024 · In Good Company · asked by Nicolai Tangen
Q: What would it take to be self sufficient at Mars?
To be self sufficient on Mars? It's really about the total tonnage that is delivered to the surface of Mars. So you can say like, well,
Apr 8, 2024 · In Good Company · asked by Nicolai Tangen
Q: And how many rockets is that?
Well, I gave a presentation on this recently, if you've looked at my recent SpaceX talk. But if you have 100, really, if you have 100 tons per flight, you need 10,000 flights to get to a million tons and that's 100 tons landed to the surface of Mars. So in order to get 100 times land to the surface of Mars, you need 505 times that number in Earth orbit. So we do a lot of orbital refilling, so launching sort of …
Mar 17, 2025 · Verdict with Ted Cruz · asked by Ted Cruz
Q: I mean what, what do we need to make that happen?
Well, you need to recreate the entire base of industry of Earth. So you know, we're here at the top of a massive pyramid of industry that starts with mining a vast array of materials. Those materials going through hundreds of steps of refinement. We grow food, obviously, we grow trees. We make things out of the trees. There's you've got to build all that on Mars. And Mars is a hostile environment. It's it sometimes …
Jul 27, 2025 · X Takeover · asked by Interviewer
Q: What kind of economy? What kind of governance?
Well, governance will be up to the Martians, but you know, we have some sort of artist impressions of what Mars city would look like. And I don't really know to be honest. Except that Mars is not yet at the point where it's sort of terraformed, where we live outdoors. So you have to live initially in glass domes or something like that. And then you could walk outside with a Mars suit, but you could not walk outside …
In his own posts on X
@elonmusk · Oct 13, 2024
@rookisaacman If civilization is reasonably stable for the next ~30 years, a self-sustaining city of a million+ people will be built on Mars
View on X ↗@elonmusk · Nov 14, 2024
It is the only way to build a large enough city for Mars to be self-sustaining https://t.co/e2Vt6NMA6L
View on X ↗
Legend: Timestamp cross-checked; Timestamp from archive, not cross-checked; Unverified: caption-only timestamp; Timestamp checked against our transcript of the X replay; Unverified timestamp: from archive transcript, not checked against the X video. Report an error →