Elon Musk's plan to colonize other worlds may have been predicted by a German scientist 70 years ago.
According to foreign media, the Telegraph reports, it is about engineer Wernher von Braun, who, writing in his 1952 science fiction novel "The Mars Project", described a man named "Elon" who ruled over the Red Planet.
An excerpt from the book - a fantasy plan for a human expedition to Mars - details how "a Martian government was established, led by ten men".
According to him, those men worked under a leader "elected by universal suffrage for five years with the name or title of Elon."
Wernher von Braun wrote a 1952 novel in which a man named "Elon" colonizes Mars.
And as The Sun notes, Von Braun was one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century and a key figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany.
After World War II, he secretly moved to the United States and became a pioneer of space technology for NASA.
As noted below, Project Mars may have been science fiction, but it included scientific calculations of how humans might travel to Mars.
The chilling preview of the book was revealed a few years ago, but resurfaced this week on social media, Telegraph reports.
In one passage, von Braun described two houses of Parliament that passed laws administered by Elon and his cabinet.
The upper chamber was called the Council of Elders and contained 60 people, each of whom was appointed for life by Elon himself.
So, seventy years later, Elon Musk is one of several billionaires with plans to colonize the Red Planet within the next few decades.
His company SpaceX recently became the first private company to launch NASA astronauts into space.
Musk, 49, is open about his desire to explore other worlds, writing on Twitter that he wants to "... make humanity a multifaceted species."
And while SpaceX's reusable rockets have only reached Earth orbit so far, the California company says future ones will travel much further.
Starship, a rocket currently under development at a site in Texas, is designed to reach the Moon, Mars and beyond.
SpaceX plans to reach orbit with the vehicle on an unmanned test flight by 2022.
Billionaire Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, hopes to send a million people to Mars in his lifetime using a fleet of 1.000 powerful rockets.
The finished product will be 50 meters long and will boast six powerful SpaceX Raptor engines. /Telegrafi/
