Book published in 1953 predicted that 'Elon' would lead humans on Mars

Does life imitate art? In Elon Musk’s case, it seems so.

The newly slimline CEO of SpaceX has boasted that humans will land on Mars by 2024, and he wants to colonize space to ensure the survival of humanity. (Although not all of his big ideas turn out the way he pitched them.)

It turns out the future was written long ago, as a book published in 1953 predicted that someone named Elon would eventually lead humans on the red planet.

Musk once quoted the following line from Young Frankenstein on Twitter: "Destiny, destiny. No escaping that for me."

It refers to predestination, where every human’s path in life is already mapped out.

It led to a Twitter user called Toby Li to respond: "Speaking about destiny, did you know that Von Braun's 1953 book ‘Mars Project’, referenced a person named Elon that would bring humans to Mars? Pretty nuts."

That’s the book ‘Mars Project: A Technical Tale’ which was written by the German aerospace engineer Wernher Von Braun.

He developed rocket tech in Nazi Germany and, later, worked on rocket space technology in the US.

The book is non-fiction, but uses a narrative to map out to a layman how a voyage to Mars could look.

The tweet pointing out the similarities isn’t entirely accurate, as in the book, it wasn’t an Elon that took humans to Mars.

Instead, it said the name of the leader’s position would be Elon, which in our view is even cooler.

Musk proclaimed himself imperator of Mars in a temporary change to his Twitter bio - showing that his destiny may gone to his head a little bit.

Just one of his many eyebrow-raising Twitter capers...

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