The SpaceX boss has envisioned people staying on the red planet in a self-sustaining city in 20 years Almost buried beneath a recent avalanche of rightwing invective posted by Elon Musk on the platform he owns, X, was one eye-popping statement that made space watchers sit up and take notice: an assertion that humans could land on Mars within four years and be living there in a self-sustaining city in 20. It seemed a fanciful boast, even by the standards of the SpaceX founder and world’s richest man, who transformed the logistics and cost of shorter-duration, near-to-Earth orbit space travel with his fleet of reusable Falcon rockets. The US government space agency, Nasa, which is collaborating with SpaceX over knowledge and technology to get astronauts to the red planet, believes a first crewed landing by 2040 would be “audacious”. Continue reading...

A controversial tweet may make it to the news, but reading every post from the world’s richest man shows how frenzied and extreme he really is It’s just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hours’ break – presumably to sleep – and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times. Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji. Continue reading...

Satellite internet service’s antennas are everywhere, from illegal mining sites to isolated Indigenous villages The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from its metal skids into the caiman-inhabited waters below. Their target, lurking in the woodland along Brazil’s Bóia River, was a hulking steel mining dredge, caught red-handed as it drilled into the riverbed, pulverising it in search of gold. Continue reading...