Elon Musk Reportedly Offered SpaceX Employees Sperm to Seed Mars Colony

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is absolutely obsessed with Mars.

The mercurial entrepreneur, who has often been seen wearing a T-shirt that reads "Occupy Mars," has long argued that humanity's number one goal should be to become a multi-planetary species by establishing a permanent foothold on the Red Planet.

That's despite of its less-than-desirable barren terrain, lack of breathable air, and extreme temperature swings.

Still, for many years, Musk has been dead set on establishing an entire city on Mars, something that will require a ludicrous amount of money, not to mention plenty of heroism and sacrifice.

In fact, the New York Times now reports, Musk has gone as far as to volunteer his sperm to seed a Martian colony — highlighting not just his obsession with the company, but his also his boundary-blurring obsession with reproduction and his own genetic material.

His willingness to provide the semen necessary to grow a colony on Mars shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Musk has long argued that the greatest threat to humanity is collapsing global fertility rates.

For his part, Musk has had 12 children with three different women in an apparent effort to address the situation. Late last month, news emerged that Musk had a third child with an executive at his brain-computer interface startup Neuralink, an unethical HR violation or civilization-rescuing intervention, depending on how you look at it.

In a 2022 tweet, Musk made his stance on the matter clear.

"If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars," he wrote.

Apart from aspiring to become the biological father for his Martian colony, Musk has leveraged many of his own businesses to create a civilization on Mars, including Boring Company tunnels to dig under the planet's surface and a Tesla Cybertruck rugged enough to traverse its mountainous landscapes.

Central to his ambitions is SpaceX's massive Starship, which will play a crucial role in ferrying resources to Mars, a journey of well over 100 million miles that could take most of a year and likely many refueling stops.

SpaceX has been noticeably quiet about its efforts to establish a colony on Mars. According to the NYT's sources, that may be due to a multibillion-dollar NASA contract that requires the space company to reach the Moon with its Starship first.

And insiders have their doubts whether Musk's astronomically ambitious plan to establish a city of one million people on Mars could ever realized, let alone in his lifetime.

"You can’t just land one million people on Mars," author and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin told the NYT, arguing that any colonization could take decades.

Nonetheless, with Musk at the helm, SpaceX employees are working on concrete plans for a Martian city, which is focused on a massive central dome for communal living, not unlike the ones shown in renders released by the company years ago.

They're even reportedly testing plant-based meat alternatives by Impossible Foods in their cafeterias to see if it's a good protein source for Mars.

Whether any of these efforts will culminate in the establishment of any permanent presence on the surface of the Red Planet remains to be seen.

But Musk is adamant that it'll work — even. in his own lifetime.

In May, he suggested in a characteristically overly optimistic tweet that it would take "less than ten" years to "land people" on Mars, and a city ten years after that.

"But for sure in 30" years, he wrote, "civilization is secured."

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