SpaceX founder and billionaire Elon Musk wants to launch a million people to Mars in hopes of saving humanity from certain doom.
Musk presented his sweeping vision at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, during a roughly 63-minute speech.
You can watch the entire talk on YouTube, which includes a Q&A session at the end.
Or you can keep scrolling to read through a full transcript that Business Insider made of his presentation, paired with Musk's slide deck that SpaceX recently released. (Note: We've made minor edits to reduce word repetition and spontaneous speech.)
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Thank you very much for having me, look forward to talking about the SpaceX Mars architecture.
And what I really want to try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it's something that we can do in our lifetimes — and that you can go, and is there really a way that anyone can go if they wanted to? I think that's really the important thing.
So first of all, why go anywhere, right? The... I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions: One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event — I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy — but there's... it's eventually, history just that there will be some doomsday event.
The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, which I hope you agree that is the right way to go.
Yes?
That's what we want.
So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city? A city that it is not merely an outpost, but could become planet and its own right, and thus we could become a truly multi-planet species.
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