The Huffington Post reports that the billionaire already set a date for landing a spacecraft on the red planet - 2018 - and to set the ball rolling on his ambition to build the first self-sustaining city on another planet.

Published in New Space magazine, Musk said: “I want to make Mars seem possible—make it seem as though it is something that we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to.”

He maintains that if humanity continues to stay only on Earth, we will be wiped out by an extinction event and instead we should become a multi-planetary species.

Currently Musk predicts that a one-way ticket to Mars would cost about $10 billion per person, but he wants to get this price down to match the average house price in the United States, which is $200,000 - a figure he hopes will motivate people to move.

“Then I think the probability of establishing a self-sustaining civilization is very high. I think it would almost certainly occur,” he said.

One of the first things needed to be constructed in the new home would be a space propellant plant in order to avoid a “graveyard” of rockets that could not be reused.

Musk said: “It would be pretty absurd to try to build a city on Mars if your spaceships just stayed on Mars and did not go back to Earth.”

The weather in the new home will be “a little cold” because it is further from the sun, but can be warmed up according to Musk.

Everything will be powered by solar panels, but the atmosphere will be slightly different - being carbon dioxide heavy.

Not only will the environment change, the colonisers will all be different, developing superhuman strength. As gravity is about 37% of that on Earth, people would be able to lift heavy things and “bound around”.