Elon Musk says we should nuke Mars to make it liveable

HE’S the eccentric billionaire that’s often compared to Tony Stark. Now Musk wants to send thermonuclear bombs to Mars.

WHILE Elon Musk spends most of his time running Tesla and Space X, his real dream is to be the first man on Mars. He even has an idea of how to make it habitable for humans... he wants to nuke it.

Yep, Musk spoke of his idea on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert yesterday as a way to heat the red planet up to a temperature humans could live in.

“It’s a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk told Colbert. “Eventually you could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet.”

He said that there’s both a slow way and a fast way to heat the surface of the planet up, with the fast option being to nuke the polar ice caps.

So how would this work?

Mars as it stands now is a dry, dead planet with no confirmed signs of life. It does however have polar ice caps that are a 50/50 split of carbon dioxide and water.

The idea with using nuclear weapons is that if they were used to vaporise the ice caps, carbon dioxide would be released into the atmosphere. Then, once the atmosphere became thick enough, a greenhouse effect would occur.

This would result in the heat and energy that comes to the planet being trapped much like it is on Earth.

More carbon dioxide would then be released until, ideally, the surface pressure of Mars would increase enough for water to be able to exist. This then leads to the possibility of human life.

Of course, there’s the concern that radiation will cover the planet, but scientists say that modern nuclear weapons can be designed to leave minimal fallout, making it perfectly fine for humans to live around 100 years later.