Steven Colbert, host of The Late Show with Steven Colbert, was quick to jokingly liken SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to a Bond villain when Musk talked about his idea of nuking Mars to speed up the process of warming up the Red Planet. Colbert was just having a good laugh while Musk maintains that this is a fast method of kickstarting climate change on Mars. He has now explained a bit more the logic behind this seemingly outrageous idea.
Speaking at a Solar City event in New York earlier this year Musk explained that his idea doesn’t call for nuking the surface of Mars, instead the idea is to nuke the sky over Martian poles every few seconds to create what would essentially be two pulsing suns over Martian poles.
“They’re really above the planet, they’re not on the planet,” Musk explains, that’s what he means by sending large fusion bombs over the poles to create pulsing suns, pointing out the fact that our Sun itself is a large fusion explosion.
The idea is that these pulsing suns will warm up Mars and convert any frozen carbon dioxide into gas, allowing for more gas in the atmosphere which should essentially warm up the surface of Mars.
Musk certainly doesn’t make it seem that this will be quite easy, when asked at the event how difficult a feat this is going to be, he simply replied “Yeah, absolutely, no problem.”
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