Elon Musk may be a clever entrepreneur (or con man) but his ideas for “terraforming” Mars with nukes and then colonizing it is utterly delusional and fatuous. In a world of declining fossil fuels, where would he find the vast amounts of energy for this harebrained scheme? And in an atmosphere that is 95 per cent CO2, how would they manufacture enough free oxygen to breathe? And what would they eat, once their freeze-dried food reserves ran out? As the idiot Lennie says in Steinbeck’s novella, “Tell me about the rabbits, George!” If he and his billionaire cronies want to “terraform” something, why not start with the Earth itself—the planet they are already destroying to make a fast buck?