Of course, it helps if you own your own space rocket company:-

Local Newspaper Article on Elon Musk...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/dreaming-of-life-on-mars-20100806-11ohe.html

He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World.

One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.

Musk's belief that this can be achieved in two decades is something that most experts would scoff at but Musk, characteristically, finds it frustratingly slow.

Twenty years seems like semi-infinity to me. That's a long time, he says, as if surprised that anyone could doubt his aims.

It is certainly tempting to dismiss it as a flight of fancy. Except, behind him on SpaceX's factory floor, Musk's nascent fleet of working space rockets are already being built.