14 DAY TRIAL // Just the other day, on Wednesday night, entrepreneur Elon Musk, the alleged real-life Tony Stark, made an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
They talked about his SpaceX rocket company, which should start sending people into space in about 2 to 3 years tops, his Tesla business, and his recent investments in renewables. All fine and dandy.
Then, suddenly, a wild idea appears
Talking to Stephen Colbert about how we should get our act together and start working towards setting up colonies on the Red Planet, Elon Musk came up with a rather odd idea to make the orb more people-friendly than it presently is and help the first Mars settlers feel more at home.
Unlike our good old Earth, Mars is a pretty cold place. To turn it into our home away from home, Elon Musk thinks we should first warm it up. How best to do it? Well, just nuke the darn orb.
“First, you're going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can warm it up. The warming could happen quickly or slowly. The quick way? Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles,” he casually explained.
Mind you, he was probably just joking
On paper, nuking Mars to warm it up and make it all nice and cosy might sound like a good idea. Dropping bombs on the Red Planet's poles would turn the frozen CO2 there into gas and release it into the atmosphere, which would in turn help heat the celestial body.
In reality, though, no good could come of it, as nuking the planet would also mean destroying its landscapes, not to mention drenching the celestial body in radiation. Essentially, we might in fact be making it inhabitable. Then again, Elon Musk was probably just joking.
Check out the video below for the first part of the entrepreneur's interview with Stephen Colbert.
