Elon Musk Says ‘70 Per Cent Chance’ He Will Be On Mars Mission In Seven Years 

In an interview with Axios on HBO, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said there is a "70 per cent" chance that he will personally go to Mars.

Musk said he can envision a flight as early as seven years from now, with a ticket price of "around a couple hundred thousand dollars."

Musk claimed that his company, SpaceX, has "recently made a number of breakthroughs that he is just really fired up about."

During the interview, Musk elaborated on the conditions he anticipated if he does make it to Mars, noting that life there would be anything but leisurely. “Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than Earth… It’s gonna be hard, there’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you’ll be working nonstop to build the base. So, you know, not much time for leisure. And once you get there, even after doing all this, it’s a very harsh environment, so you, there’s a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we’re not sure.”

In a conference in September 2016, Elon Musk had articulated his vision to colonise Mars and said that he needs just 40 to 100 years to create a self-sustaining civilisation of 1 million people in the red planet.

SpaceX's plans for taking humans to the moon and Mars depends on its development of Starship: A massive rocket the size of a 32-storey building and capable of carrying dozens of people.

In the interview, Musk discussed merging Artificial Intelligence and humans. He said he was working to build an “electron-to-neuron interface at a micro level.” He said the long-term aim of such a project was to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”