UAE wants to build Chicago-sized city on Mars by next century
Casting their gaze above the vanishingly thin spire of the half-mile tall Burj Khalifa, the United Arab Emirates is reaching for the stars.
Not content with the glamour of world鈥檚 tallest skyscraper, a palm tree-shaped island, and an indoor ski resort, the oil soaked UAE has recently been thinking bigger, with more socially minded investment projects such as a and a 鈥�.鈥� Now they鈥檙e doubling down on that trend with a聽plan to establish a Chicago-sized city on Mars.
On Tuesday at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the vice president of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, unveiled the Mars 2117 Project. As the name suggests, it aims to build a human settlement on Mars over the next hundred years.
To say the project is ambitious in scale would be an understatement. "The city is roughly the size of Chicago. It has a ," Saeed Al Gergawi, manager of the scientific and research committee of the World Government Summit, told CNBC.
The undertaking really takes the 鈥渏ourney of a thousand miles鈥� philosophy to heart, since this odyssey will be much, much longer. And that first step is research. The project to develop faster transportation, and better ways to live in space, The Washington Post reports. The country also hopes to set up special space programs at national universities.聽
This team will be Emirati at first, eventually widening to include scientists from other countries as well. 鈥淥ur aim is that the to make this dream a reality,鈥� Sheikh Maktoum聽explained, according to technology new website Futurism.
While the UAE hasn鈥檛 been a big player in the new space race thus far, the new initiative isn鈥檛 their first sign of celestial ambitions. First revealed in 2014, just last month the Emirates Mars Mission announced that its unmanned Hope spacecraft is .
It now joins a crowded field of Mars hopefuls, including , , and SpaceX, which chief executive officer Elon Musk famously founded for just that purpose. Rather than next century, Mr. Musk has his sights set on next decade, a timeline some think overly optimistic. His plan, announced last fall, has been criticized as being heavy on hard transportation details but that would explain how people would eat, breath, and stay healthy on the Red Planet.
In this respect, the UAE鈥檚 long-term approach may be one of the most down-to-Earth of the bunch. Maktoum聽took to Twitter to tease images of .
But on at least one point, the UAE agrees with SpaceX: The price has to come down. Mr. Gergawi told CNBC that Musk鈥檚 figure of $200,000 per one-way ticket is 鈥渘ot an unreasonable number,鈥� but should get cheaper over time.
鈥淲hen you look at 100 years from now, it could probably be much lower by a factor of 10,鈥澛爃e added.
To those who might say that鈥檚 a naive view, Maktoum聽suggested finding optimism in past and present trends: 鈥淲hoever looks into the scientific breakthroughs in the current century believes that human abilities can realize the most important human dream.鈥�
