With SpaceX now set to receive its $2.6 billion slice of the manned space travel pie, Elon Musk has sensed the time is right to set the Mars agenda. There is nowhere else on the planet where such private financial power, engineering resource, visionary clout, and now responsibility is concentrated into the will of one man. In short, Musk is US citizen number one right now, the mold for mankind.

Rogue asteroids are the god’s little ways of reminding us all of the importance of having a space program. They also remind us that having a nuclear program capable of generating versatile nukes to defend Earth against them may not be such a bad idea either. But many, including Musk, have realized that Earth probably has but one shot at the big leagues, and we are it. In other words, if life created on Earth is to be that which seeds the entire galaxy, we best have a backup.

Together with Mars society president Robert Zubrin, and Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp, the will to go to Mars is now birthing a way. For reasons detailed decades ago, the case for making Mars humanity’s backup is a good one. More importantly, it doesn’t have to be settled science that Mars is the place to be, only that those making it happen say it is so. As Musk will tell you, Mars is the reason there is a SpaceX, and the best time to go is probably in about 15 or 20 years.

In the mid-2030s, Mars will be about as close to us as it gets. During this window of opportunity Mars will be about 36 million miles away and the travel time measured in months rather than years. As far as the size of the Mars cultural-genetic depot, Musk isn’t thinking small. Rather than just a skeleton crew of a few pioneers with Swiss Army Knife-like skill sets, he imagines a colony that grows a million strong in shipments of 100 at a time.

That’s going to be a lot of trips back and forth. To meet the demand, Musk says he is working on a reusable rocket that can land smoothly and be ready for action again within an hour. The growth of a colony on Mars would be exciting to watch, and probably more exciting to join. The recent Mars One colony signup quickly drew over 200,000 applicants.

It seems there will be no shortage of folks eager to take a one-way trip into the unknown. Provided technology can keep pace with dreams, the first Martians might actually be us.

Now read: Elon Musk warns us that human-level AI is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’