If he wants to make his 2026 Mars promise, he needs to be ready to go in the next month or so. I'm a bit sceptical.

On the other hand, if we shortly discover an asteroid on course to meet Earth within a concerning time frame or some other predictable disaster coming down the pike, they'll be a mass effort to take giant steps to ensure he and others are not wrong.

> some other predictable disaster coming down the pike

I mean, we have one of those right now (that we've known about since at least the 1980s) and ...

> they'll be a mass effort to take giant steps

That isn't happening. And climate change is an easy thing to deal with compared with the colonisation of Mars.