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Elon Musk's Latest Idea: Let's Nuke Mars

Posted by timothy on from the to-wit-from-orbit dept.

KindMind writes: The Register reports that Elon Musk, in an appearance on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, said that to begin with, human residents on the red planet would need to live in "transparent domes." Before a move to more hospitable habitats, one needs only "to warm it up" and Musk thinks there's a fast way and a slow way to do that. The fast way "is drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles" and the slow way "is to release greenhouse gases, like we are doing on Earth."

2 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Greenhouse gasses? by grimmjeeper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pardon me for injecting actual science but Mars doesn't have an earth like dipole magnetic field. It can't support a Van Allen radiation belt like Earth. As a result, the solar wind is not deflected as well and the atmosphere is not sustainable. So adding a bunch of greenhouse gas would be pointless as it would just be blown away by the solar wind. So yeah, it's great to dream up ideas on how to make Mars a place we can live, it's also good to come up with ideas that might actually work.

    1. Re:Greenhouse gasses? by lexman098 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Fossil fuels are literally made from fossils of long dead organic organisms. If we found fossil fuels on mars the bigger story would be that there was enough life at one point to create it.