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Tech tycoon Elon Musk has been called out by TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh for spending too much time focusing on building life on Mars and too little on saving planet Earth
Alan Titchmarsh has put a rocket up Elon Musk for focusing more on making barren Mars habitable than saving green Earth. The telly gardening guru said the SpaceX pioneer could make a "far greater contribution to the future of mankind here" than by trying to build a city on the Red Planet.
Alan, 75, said the billionaire would be better off spending his fortune protecting the woodlands, mountains, rivers and meadows on Earth instead of on "gaunt and treeless" Mars.
He suggested Musk could start by "making a garden". The space company tycoon has claimed his Starship re-usable rocket launcher will help mankind make the 140 million mile trip to inhabit Mars.
He plans to run the first manned flights in four years and has claimed more than a million people will be living in a space city there within 30 years. But his plans have not impressed Love Your Garden and Ground Force legend Titch who intends to keep his feet firmly on the Earth.
Alan told BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine: "The tycoon Elon Musk has an ambition to one day land on a distant planet. Good luck to him in those gaunt and treeless landscapes.
"If he diverted his energies into sustaining the woodlands and the mountains, the rivers and the meadows around him, he would make a far greater contribution to the future of mankind here on Earth. He could do worse than start off by making a garden."
Titch said it was vital resources were ploughed into saving the Earth instead of looking for a new one. He went on: "Alas today we pay farmers to fill fields of good Earth with solar panels to save energy, failing to see that the energy saved is likely being used to ship cheap foreign food across the oceans to our shores.
"Our farmers, growers and commercial gardeners are expected to get by on an ever-diminishing budget, driven by consumers who will buy their food from whichever supermarket offers them the best bargain.
"Unless we support our local growers and pay a fair price for food, the ultimate play-out of this situation is that within a frighteningly short space of time the UK will not grow any of its own food - every single comestible item will be imported.
"The way to fight against this is to show our children and grandchildren just what a patch of land can do to sustain us physically and spiritually. You know how good you feel when you are out there, when you are cultivating things, when you have made them look beautiful.
"Pass on that enthusiasm and encourage young people to consider it as a career. Only then will they truly understand the vital importance of the landscape in feeding us and contributing to our mental health."
Meanwhile Musk claims moving folk to Mars will help safeguard the future of mankind. "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet," he has said.
English (US) ·