Over the last week or so there have been a whole lot of stories about Elon Musks plans for colonization of Mars. Good, great, fine. But some stories are better than others. And one way to get into the “others” category is to have some factual error or just plain bad writing. For example:

Elon Musk claims Mars colony dreams critical to avoid ‘Doomsday’ event

Out of all the options currently open to us, Venus is a cooking pot of pressure and acid, Mercury is too close to the sun and the planet’s moons are difficult to reach…

The moons of Mercury are hard to reach? Yeah, I imagine they are. They’re as hard to reach as Alderaan, Dune and The Land Of Honest Politicians.

It is estimated that sending a single person to Mars could cost up to $10 billion at the moment. … Therefore, Musk wants to eventually reduce the cost to the average price of a house in the US — roughly $200,000 — but in order to reach this goal and slash the expense by five million percent, a number of steps will need to be taken.

Errrrrmmmm… cutting a price tag from $10,000,000,000 to $200,000 is cutting the cost by 99.998%, not “five million percent.” If you cut the cost of something by 100%, you make it free. If you cut it by *more* than 100%, you actually get paid.