• Elon Musk was on Monday named Time magazine’s Person of the Year
  • Musk told the magazine he intended on taking ‘a futuristic Noah’s Ark’ to Mars
  • The entrepreneur’s plan raised eyebrows among scientists
  • They said that his scheme was ‘multiple centuries’ from fruition
  • Musk has long planned to build a city on Mars and allow people to live there

Elon Musk‘s plan to take a ‘futuristic Noah’s Ark’ to Mars has been ridiculed by scientists who say the claim is little more than a ‘a brilliant sound bite’ and the reality is centuries off and would be incredibly difficult to achieve.

Musk, 50, told Time magazine on Monday that he had big plans for the next phase of space exploration after SpaceX‘s Starship rockets land on Mars within the next five years.

‘The next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there,’ he said.

‘Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring more than two, though – it’s a little weird if there’s only two.’

Musk has repeatedly said that he hopes to help humans colonize Mars as Earth’s resources dwindle and climate change gets worse.

‘The goal overall has been to make life multi-planetary and enable humanity to become a spacefaring civilization,’ Musk said in the Time interview, where he explained he’s bring animals and plants to the Red Planet.

But experts remain skeptical and were quick to point out the huge challenges in raising livestock on a planet without oxygen.

Others said the plan was hundreds of years away from fruition.

Roger Wiens, a scientist based at Los Alamos in New Mexico, who is currently leading the SuperCam laser instrument on the Perseverance rover on Mars, told DailyMail.com the idea was ‘a brilliant sound bite.’

‘Mars, with its CO2 atmosphere, might be a good place to grow plants if they are kept warm and watered, but it would be a terrible place to drop off animals, who need oxygen to breathe,’ he said.

‘Humans might be smart enough to don oxygen breathing systems, but would an animal be smart enough to adjust such a system if it was falling off its face? I don’t think so. We would end up with a lot of dead animals. Let’s try botanical gardens first.’

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was equally skeptical.

He told DailyMail.com it would likely take ‘multiple centuries’ until man was able to raise animals on Mars.

‘Humans can only exist as part of a biosphere – a complex ecology with many species,’ he said.

‘If we are someday to build a human civilization on Mars that is self-sustaining, then yes, we will have to do the Noah’s Ark thing at some level.

‘Is Musk anywhere close to doing this – not at all.’

McDowell said that he did not rule out early Martian settlers ‘towards the end of this century’ bringing their pets.

But, he stressed, the idea of raising livestock or wild animals in significant quantities was still a long way in the future.

‘We have just begun to tiptoe into space,’ he said.

He said the populating of Mars by animals, plants and viruses was the ‘inevitable long term logical outcome.’

McDowell added: ‘But it will take centuries.’