Why The Boring Company Is The Key To Elon's Mars Colony!

OK, so we all know the official story about Elon Musk inventing the Boring Company while stuck in California traffic and deciding he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.  It’s a good story. It’s relatable. Memorable. Kinda funny. Almost like the perfect cover story for developing a secret technology, hidden in plain sight.

What if I told you that the real reason that Elon Musk started the Boring Company was to develop a next generation tunnel boring machine to deploy on the planet Mars and construct his own underground Martian city?

OK, fair enough, it’s not exactly an Earth shattering revelation or even a significant stretch of the imagination. Most people would probably assume that Elon is going to try and launch one of these boring machines into space at some point. Makes sense. But still, this remains a subject that doesn’t get much airtime as a serious discussion. And that’s a shame because it’s really fun to imagine the future connection between what is happening right here on Earth, under the streets of Las Vegas, with what could someday become the first human settlement on an extra terrestrial world.

So let’s talk about Boring tunnels on Mars.

Why Tunnel on Mars?

We can start off with the reasons why we would even want to dig tunnels on Mars. Because we’re all going to live under awesome, sci-fi bubble domes, right? Not so much. That looks great in renderings, but when it comes to practicality, the giant domes are by far the worst idea.

The reality of life on Mars will require significant protection from the elements - that means radiation, micro meteorites, atmospheric exposure and dust storms. What’s going to happen to that giant dome the first time that an 8 kilometer high cloud of electrostatic dust rolls through? Who’s gonna clean it?

Radiation is going to be a big concern for long term settlements on Mars - exposure to radiation from the sun is about 40 to 50 times greater on the surface of Mars compared to the surface of Earth. This is because Mars has no active molten core, and therefore no magnetosphere to repel cosmic rays and solar winds. Mars doesn’t have much of an atmosphere at all, really. 

And the lack of atmosphere leaves us more vulnerable to meteors while we are staying on the Red Planet. Earth has a very dense atmosphere, so when meteorites hit it at a speed of up to 72 Km/s, the intense heat generated by friction causes the rock to burn up long before it reaches the ground. And even if something does get through, it’s going to end up a lot smaller on impact than it was out in space. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than 1% of ours on Earth, so that meteorite is still going to be moving at pretty close to 72 Km/s when it hits our dome - that won’t end well.

And exposure to this low pressure environment is going to be an even bigger problem for the human body - if there were to be a breach in the habitat and a depressurization, then our blood would boil and our eyeballs would explode. Total Recall got that one right.

So, going underground would be a great way to solve some of the biggest challenges that the planet Mars throws at us. And Elon Musk knows this very well.

There’s a clip of Elon answering questions at a conference back in 2017. And when asked about how the tunnel boring idea would relate to his Mars colony plans, Elon said this:

“I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars. Building underground habitats with good radiation shielding, you could build a whole city underground if you wanted to, people would still want to go outside from time to time, but you can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars, I do think there is a lot of overlap in that area.”

Elon also theorized that even though there would be a significant technological overlap, there would need to be a different optimization for a Mars boring machine versus an Earth boring machine. And he said that he expects there will be a lot of ice mining happening on Mars, and in general a lot of mining activity that these boring machines could be used for.

We’re pretty sure that the surface of Mars is going to be rich in metals like copper, chromium, iron and nickel - which will be vital for what’s called ‘in situ’ resources, that means using what’s available on the planet to support the colony. Mining water is going to be a huge part of this. It’s very likely that there is a large amount of ice frozen in the surface of Mars. It’s not going to be like in the movie Total Recall, where they imagine that the entire core of Mars is made of ice, but there should be plenty to support a small colony there.

Boring Company x SpaceX

Let's start connecting some dots here. In 2016, the same year that the Boring Company was conceived, SpaceX released their first illustrations for an interplanetary transport system - this would go on to become the Starship. So, we know that Elon was very much in the headspace of landing on Mars in this particular year.

The very first Boring Company tunnel ever created was underneath the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne California.

And just recently, Elon announced that he is working on a third edition of his master plan that will present a unified vision for his three companies, Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company.

If that’s not enough, take a look at this, the diameter of a PrufRock boring machine is 8 meters. The diameter of a cargo fairing on the SpaceX Starship is 9 meters. They would fit together like a glove. Almost like it was done on purpose. And unleashing one of these beasts on Mars would give us the ability to tunnel at a near snail-like pace of 17 meters per hour. We’d have a subterranean city in no time.

Boring transit tunnels under the surface of Mars would allow for easy, ultra high speed hyper loop systems - because to build a hyperloop on Earth, we have to create an artificial vacuum inside the tube to factor out wind resistance. But the atmosphere on Mars is already in a near vacuum state, so by simply allowing the ambient pressure into the loop, a vehicle could move through it at incredible speed with virtually zero resistance.

We could even bore a giant circular tunnel, with a mobile habitat inside that would be in constant motion, like a centrifuge, and that would create an artificial gravity effect, simulating the conditions on Earth. Time spent inside the centrifuge would help us to mitigate the weakening effects of low Martian gravity.

Now, of course there is one giant thorn in the side of that theory, and that is weight. So, a Starship can lift at least 100 metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars, which is spectacular. However, some research shows that the weight of a PrufRock boring machine is going to be about 1,200 metric tons. So… that doesn’t add up. In reality it would take 12 spaceships to carry one boring machine, which would not be impossible if Elon actually manages to build his fleet of 1,000 Starships. But it’s also not as streamlined as we’d like to imagine. As much as I love the theory, we do have to keep it real and debunk that idea just a little bit.

The Real Martian Tunnels

OK, now what if I told you we don’t even need boring machines on Mars because it is already full of natural tunnels? This is kind of mind blowing, but it turns out the planet itself has already done the hard work for us.

The surface of Mars is full of rock formations called lava tubes. These are leftovers from the ancient times when Mars was volcanically active, just like the Earth. At some point over the past 4 billion years, our two planets probably looked very similar to each other, living bodies with active, molten cores of rock and metal. The giant mountain Olympus Mons on the surface of Mars is the tallest known mountain in the solar system, more than two and a half times the height of Everest, this is the remnant of a Martian volcano. But Mars started to cool down much faster than the Earth, maybe because it’s smaller, maybe because it’s farther away from the Sun. But the core of Mars solidified, the magnetic field dissipated and the atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind. But left behind were these gigantic tunnels, cut into the surface rock by the ancient lava flows.

We know that these tubes exist on Mars because we have observed the skylights in the tunnel ceilings in our satellite flybys. These are points where the roof of the lava tube caves in, leaving a perfectly round hole in the surface that reveals the hollow cavern underneath. We have spotted tons of these skylights on Mars - they’re on the Moon too - and that tells us there is already a network of tunnels just waiting to be found.

Because of the low gravity on Mars, these lava tubes will be significantly wider than the ones that we see form on the Earth  - they could be hundreds of meters across and kilometers in length. The roofs of these tunnels could be as much as 90 meters thick, providing more than enough shielding against radiation, meteorites and anything else the solar system can throw at us. The insulating effect of these cave tunnels should maintain a consistent temperature of around negative 20℃. And because we believe that the rock that makes up the outer surface of Mars will be non-porous in nature, we should at some point be able to create a pressurized, artificial atmosphere within the caves. So, it would be chilly, but we could breathe outside of a helmet and our eyes wouldn’t explode. Not too terribly bad.

And on top of all that, the insides of these tubes could very well be the place where we find the remains of past life on Mars. Maybe all of the evidence has been blasted away from the surface or buried under hundreds of millions of years of dust storms. But under the ground could be the preserved fossils of microorganisms or even fish or reptiles or animals. Maybe there was a civilization of some kind of mammal living on Mars when the planet began to die and they retreated under the ground for a last ditch effort at survival. We could find some freaky stuff down there.

Does this rule out the ‘Boring Company in space’ idea entirely? Nah. It still would be awesome and extremely useful to have tunnel boring machines running on Mars. Maybe we can use the natural tubes as primarily settlements and main arteries of our infrastructure and we interconnect them with our own sub network of tunnels and hyper loops. Taking all factors into consideration, that’s probably the best case scenario for a Mars city, underground hubs with their own transit system tying it all together. We use the caves as home, and we treat the surface like a utility, a place to harness solar energy, to build greenhouses and grow food, a place for exploration and adventure. Maybe think of it like a coastal city on Earth, we live on the land and we work on the water - except the land is a cave and water is the surface of an alien world.

It’s amazing that we’re alive at a point in human history where we can even talk about things like this in any realistic sense. The fact that this stuff is even remotely possible is mind blowing.