New York – SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday, inside the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert”, that perhaps there is a path to transform Mars into an inhabitable place for humans. What he proposes is to bomb Mars with thermonuclear bombs.
According to Musk, by bombing Mars with thermonuclear weapons, scientists could transform the red planet into a green one for the nuking will “melt the Mars’ polar ice caps and kick-start a greenhouse effect (similar to the one we’re currently here) that would quickly make the planet warmer and would actually make it more hospitable.”
Although his theory may sound like a joke for many, Musk’s thoughts are supported by Michael Shara, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s astrophysics department. He also believes that modern thermonuclear weapons can be created with very little fallout. The danger they could produce will decrease after centuries.
“There’s the fast way and the slow way. The fast way is drop thermo nuclear weapons over the polls,” Musk said to Colbert.”The slow way would be to release greenhouse gasses like we are doing on earth. We’ve gotten a lot of experience doing that.”
However, there is a lot some skepticism in the scientific community. Nuking Mars is not the solution since there is a possibility that at the very least, all the liquid created after the bombing could simply refreeze, making the procedure ineffective. Moreover, all the radiation released into the atmosphere could make the planet uninhabitable again.
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told U.S. News that “instead of warming Mars, the explosions could cause nuclear winter, by generating so much dust and particles that they literally block out a significant portion of the incoming sunlight, cooling down the planet.”
Other plans for the future
Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a private company that designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecrafts since its foundation in 2002. According to its website, Its mission is to revolutionize space technology with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
SpaceX has a deal with NASA of $1.6 Billion to fly numerous cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station. As stated by Musk in the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, SpaceX’s rockets will be also safe enough for human travel in only two to three years.
Source: Space X