Elon Musk says settlers will likely die on Mars. He's right.

When Elon Musk said there’s a ‘good chance’ the first settlers on the Red Planet will die there, at an August 2020 conference, the outcome was easy to imagine. It’s a dangerous place, after all. But that obscures the ultimate goal of any colony: to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth.

- By Caroline Delbert, Illustration by Alyse Markel using Getting Images

Several necessities for achieving this feat are in use or development already. The long-term life-support technology aboard the International Space Station, for example, already recycles air and water. Mars, however, will require life support for the same group of people, not a group that rotates every few months with frequent short trips from Earth.

The key to surviving the desperate conditions that await the first Martian settlers lies in balancing our response to predictable events – limited water, no atmosphere, radiation – and developing a resilience against unpredictable events, says Jennifer Buz, PhD, an areologist (one who studies Mars) at Northern Arizona University. ‘There’s a lot you can plan for, so you could kind of prolong your life to an extent, but there’s always going to be something that’s not perfectly accounted for.’