Elon Musk again publically revealed his estimate on the timeline as to when humans will land on Mars. In a recent tweet, the SpaceX CEO said that he would be surprised if humans are not on the red planet by 2029, a year that he believes would be a “pivotal year”. Musk made this prediction while responding to a tweet by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who posted a photo featuring a female cyborg from the manga movie Ghost in the Shell. The movie’s poster shared by Dorsey featured a tagline that read “People love machines in 2029” to which Musk replied, “2029 feels like a pivotal year. I’d be surprised if we don’t have AGI by then. Hopefully, people on Mars too”.
The AGI, which Musk mentioned in his tweet, stands for Artificial General Intelligence. As ZDNet explains it, AGI would make a machine capable of understanding the world as well as humans do and enable it to carry out a wide range of tasks that robots can’t do without human instincts. This technology enabling AGI does not exist yet, however, it has been used in science-fiction stories and movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix. The arena of AI has many experts engaged in serious debates as many fear that advancements in AI would make robots enslave humans and turn the world into a dystopian society.
But what about Mars?
If robots do take over the world, humans would have to look for another planet to settle on, and Mars is the nearest and most practical option. To ensure that humanity has a long-lasting existence, Musk and his team are working to relocate humans to Mars but he has made some bold predictions as to when this will happen. In an interview with Time magazine last December, Musk had said that he would be surprised if humans don’t reach Mars within the next five years. Needless to say, this prediction is a hard pill to swallow as the next Moon landing is expected to occur no earlier than 2025 or even 2026.
Still, the team of SpaceX and its President Gwynne Shotwell believe that humanity will indeed set foot on the red planet within this decade. She had also stated that the Moon landing will happen even sooner than the said timeline.
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