In recent years, Musk can be regarded as a legend, in just a few years, climbed to the world's richest man, but his vision is far greater than everyone else, that is, to conquer Mars and colonize Mars. Musk has begun to deploy a lot of preparations for the colonization of Mars, such as the giant drill he plans to build to use it to dig up Mars.
There is also an interesting story about the plan to develop a giant drill with a diameter of 8 meters to excavate Mars, Musk encountered a serious traffic jam in California, angry to open a boring company, he decided to build a tunnel boring machine, and then began to dig underground routes to reduce traffic pressure. Of course, the story is just a joke, the real reason is not so simple, Elon Musk founded the drilling company to develop the next generation of tunnel drills, deploy them on Mars, and build his own Martian dungeon. So is it really possible to dig tunnels on Mars? Is Musk really going to colonize Mars?
Admittedly, Musk's ambitions are quite ambitious, but it will be very difficult to achieve, life on the ground of Mars will require a lot of protection against cosmic radiation, and the exposure of solar radiation is 40 to 50 times that of Earth. At the same time, humans also need to prevent micrometeroids from hitting, because the atmosphere of Mars is very thin, and there are terrible sandstorms, so humans may need to build a huge dome. Mars doesn't have an active molten core, so there's no magnetosphere to repel cosmic rays and the solar wind, and Mars doesn't actually have much of an atmosphere, so Mars is more susceptible to meteors.
Earth's atmosphere is very dense, so when a meteorite hits the earth at speeds of up to 72 kilometers per second, the intense heat generated by friction causes the rock to burn off before it reaches the ground, and even if something passes, its final impact will be much smaller than in space. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than one percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure, so the meteorite will still move at a fairly fast speed when it hits our dome, at a speed of nearly 72 kilometers per second, and exposure to this low-pressure environment will be a bigger problem for the human body, so Musk shifted the idea to the subsurface of Mars.
Indeed, going underground would be a good solution, and it is for this reason that Musk proposed the idea of tunneling in 2017 with his Mars Colony program, musk believes that digging tunnels is very helpful for Mars to build underground habitats, and there is good environmental radiation to shield radiation. We can build an entire city underground, and as long as we build a large number of underground buildings on Mars with the right drilling techniques, we can create a huge dungeon. At the same time, he expects a lot of ice digging activity on Mars, and in general, these drills can be used for many mining activities. Because the surface of Mars will be rich in metals such as copper chromium and nickel, which are essential for human survival, this is called in situ resources, that is, the use of existing resources on Mars to support the colony's mining water.
It is likely that there is a large amount of ice freezing on the surface of Mars, and the entire core of Mars is made up of ice, with enough ice to support it. That's why Musk founded the drilling company. The drilling company, just below Spacex and headquartered in Hawthorne, California, is currently planning to develop a rock drilling rig with a diameter of 8 meters, but the digging speed is not fast, and it can tunnel at a speed of about 17 meters per hour. If a transport tunnel is excavated under the surface of Mars, a simple ultra-high-speed hyper-loop system can be achieved, because to build a hyper-loop on Earth, we must create an artificial vacuum inside the pipe to remove wind resistance, but the atmosphere on Mars is already in a state close to vacuum, so as long as the ambient pressure is allowed to enter the loop, the vehicle can pass at an incredible speed, there is almost no resistance, we can even open a huge circular tunnel with a moving habitat inside, It can be like a centrifuge that will produce an artificial gravitational effect that simulates conditions on Earth. Time inside the centrifuge will help us mitigate the attenuation effects of Mars' low gravity.
Of course, this theory also has a huge drawback, and that is weight. A starship can lift at least 100 metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars, but the drill musk developed will weigh about 1200 metric tons, so this is not realistic, it takes 12 spaceships to carry a drill, and if Elon does succeed in building a fleet of 1000 starships, it will be a different matter.
However, some people think that we may not need a drill on Mars at all, because it is already full of natural tunnels, just like Earth, and the surface of Mars is actually full of rock formations called lava tubes, which are left over from ancient times. Mars and Earth have been as active at some point over the past 4 billion years, and the two planets may look very similar, with active rock and metal molten nuclei. Mount Olympus, a huge mountain on the surface of Mars, is the highest known mountain in the solar system, and its height is twice that of Mount Everest, but Mars is starting to cool much faster than Earth, probably because it is smaller than Earth, probably because it is farther away from the Sun, but the core of Mars solidifies, the magnetic field dissipates, the atmosphere is blown away by the sun, but these huge tunnels are left with these huge tunnels that are cut to the surface of the rock by ancient lava flows, and the top of the lava tube leaves a perfect round hole in the surface, The hollow cave below is revealed. Human satellites have found tons of circular holes on Mars, and similar holes have been found on the Moon.
All of this suggests that Mars already has a network of tunnels, and these lava tubes will be much wider than the lava tubes we see on Earth. They may be hundreds of meters wide and hundreds of kilometers long. The tops of these tunnels may be 90 meters thick enough to withstand radiating meteorites and anything the solar system might throw at us. The thermal insulation of these cave tunnels should be kept at a constant temperature of about minus 20 degrees Celsius, as scientists believe that the rocks that make up the outer surface of Mars are inherently porous and that we should be able to create a pressurized artificial atmosphere inside the caves.
Most importantly, the inside of these tubes is likely to be the site of remnants of past life on Mars, perhaps all the evidence buried under a dust storm for hundreds of millions of years, but underground it may be preserved microbial fossils, even fossil animals of fish, reptiles or other creatures, and perhaps some kind of mammalian civilization living on Mars. When Mars begins to die, these creatures retreat to the underground to make a last-ditch effort to survive. Of course, this is only a possibility, but we cannot deny this possibility.
Musk believes that humans could use Mars' natural pipelines as the main settlements and main arteries of our infrastructure, and then we connect them to the tunnels we dug ourselves to form an underground local area network. As for the surface, it can be used as a utility, a place to use solar energy to build greenhouses and grow food, a place to explore and adventure. Some people may say that it is somewhat unrealistic to say these things now, but we do not rule out that these things will be realized in the distant future, do you think? Feel free to leave your thoughts!