Elon Musk has issued a terrifying warning about his desperate efforts to sustain life on Mars. The world’s richest man has been making inroads in his vision to colonize Mars, even as he juggled his high profile work with the Department of Government Efficiency and his under-siege company, Tesla.

Speaking to Fox’s Jesse Watters on Monday, Musk revealed why he is pouring so many resources into his Mars mission. ‘Mars is life insurance for life collectively,’ he revealed. ‘So, eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun. The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated.’

Musk said his mission is far beyond simply reaching Mars once. Instead, he wants to ensure the ‘survival of civilization.’ ‘We have a long way to go because it’s not just about landing on Mars and doing flags and footprints.’ NASA has long warned that eventually the sun will run out of energy. When it begins to die, NASA states the sun will expand into a giant red star, which could become so large it engulfs Mercury, Venus and potentially Earth.

Scientists estimate this process could begin to occur in about five billion years. But Musk is eager to ensure Mars is ‘sufficiently self-sustaining’ within his lifetime, describing it as ‘the fundamental fork in the road of destiny.’ Musk often uses the ‘fork in the road’ analogy when explaining his big picture plans, including during his takeover of Twitter.

President Donald Trump used the same phrase when he initiated a voluntary redundancy rollout for federal government employees, and Musk hinted at the time that he helped to orchestrate the plan. Musk said on Monday his mission for Mars is for it to one day ‘grow by itself if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, whether that is because civilization died with a bang or a whimper.’ ‘If the resupply ships are necessary for Mars to survive, then we have not created life insurance. We’ve not created life insurance for life collectively. ‘So that’s the key point in the future where [the] destiny of life, as we know it, will forever be affected, is when Mars becomes self-sustaining.’

Musk’s chilling warning comes just days after he won a vote to create his own Texas city to help in his colonization efforts. The SpaceX boss will turn his company’s headquarters at Boca Chica – at the southern tip of the Lone Star State – into a city named Starbase. Residents voted 173 to 4 to incorporate Starbase as a city, Bloomberg reported.

Most of the voters who live there are Musk’s employees at SpaceX, which he relocated to Texas over California’s new gender identity laws earlier this year. ‘Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space,’ a spokesperson for Starbase said on X.

Starbase is the facility and launch site for the SpaceX rocket program that is under contract with the Department of Defense and NASA that hopes to send astronauts back to the moon and someday to Mars. Musk first promised in 2011 to put a man on Mars within 10 years. Then he claimed he would send a manned mission by 2024.

Last month, he once again scaled back that ambition – promising to send a SpaceX Starship rocket containing one of his Tesla Optimus robots to the Red Planet by the end of 2026. And if that is successful, he predicts he will finally send a human to Mars by as early as 2029 – but admitted that 2031 ‘is more likely.’

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