Devon Eriksen
@Devon_Eriksen_ · Feb 12, 2026
When someone I know to be smart and knowledgeable says something that seems off base and wrong, then I try to assume there's some part of their ideas that I'm not understanding.
So help me out here, @JoelSercel.
My notion is that Martian cities, at the first Martian cities,
Joel C. Sercel, PhD@JoelSercel· Apr 25, 2023@elonmusk @paulg On this Elon, I think you are 100% wrong. You need to move the same amount of mass to make a Mars habitat and you can't get 1 g on Mars, which may be needed for multigenerational human life.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
You need to get mass from a substrate, like the Moon or Mars, to grow a major civilization, which obviously requires vast amounts of mass.
It is extremely inefficient to keep moving the mass out of some planetary gravity well to grow and the asteroid belt is too far away and too spread out.
Once you have Von Neumann machines like Optimi on a major mass substrate, they can convert that local mass to civilization very efficiently.
07:14 PM · February 12, 2026 · 297.7K views
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