The world seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse with the rise of ISIS, the looming economic downturn and the corrosion of civil liberties. If the apocalypse does occur, it is currently being posited that the top one percent plans to flee to Mars and leave the gamut of us to face extinction.

It’s sounds like a mass conspiracy theory, but it really is true. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, have a plan to send the world’s richest people to Mars to start over, while leaving the remaining 99 percent of people behind to perish with the planet.

This is the hidden truth driving Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. Both space companies are devising possible ways that the human species could spread to other planets. The problem is that only the wealthiest people will have a one-way ticket to Mars. The price tag attached to Musk’s target ticket is $500,000 per person; and that’s just getting there.⁽¹⁾

Fly me to the moon

The facts speak for themselves. Just last month, Blue Origin took space technology to a new horizon by launching a rocket 62 miles into space and landing it upright, just a few feet from its initial launch pad. Such a feat is a step towards developing reusable rockets, which is necessary to make a flight to Mars economically feasible for anyone who isn’t a billionaire.⁽¹⁾

To put this into perspective: it costs NASA $200 million to send a single astronaut into space – and that’s for flights that just go into orbit. No one has ever made a reusable rocket, which is a foremost reason why space travel is so expensive.

Nevertheless, launching a few rockets into space is a long way away from sending people to the red planet, but SpaceX and Blue Origin are determined: “Our ultimate vision is millions of people living and working in space,” Bezos told reporters following the Blue Origin landing. Musk is even more ambitious. “We need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilization. That’s the next step,” he said.⁽¹⁾

A narrow opportunity

Some scientists and writers believe a trip to Mars may be feasible in as little as 10 years. Musk has warned in previous remarks that the technology necessary to send people to Mars may only exist during a narrow window of opportunity. Religious extremists, anti-technology movements or the eruption of world war III could close that window.

“You know, in 1912 they were proclaiming a new age of peace and prosperity, saying that it was a golden age, war was over. And then you had World War I, followed by World War II, followed by the Cold War. So I think we need to acknowledge that there’s certainly a possibility of a third World War, and if that does occur it could be far worse than anything that’s happened before,” Musk told sources. By 2040, Musk argues that the red planet should be thriving with Martian colonies.⁽²⁾

Musk is overambitious. Best estimates suggest human migration to Mars won’t be possible until after 2040. The volume of flights should drive the cost down from the millions to $500,000 per person. People could even start companies and settle their families on Mars.

“It’s not going to be a vacation jaunt,” Musk said in an interview. “It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies.” His current goal is to send one million people to Mars, which Musk states, “is the critical threshold for us as a civilization to not join the potentially large number of one-planet dead civilizations out there.”⁽¹⁾

But why wait for a global catastrophe to send the top one percent to Mars? In fact, sending the top one percent to Mars now could help save the planet later. At any rate, good riddance.

Sources include:

(1) NewsWeek.com

(2) Space.news