A couple of weeks ago Elon Musk chatted to Stephen Colbert about technology and all the stuff that makes him really sexy. During the conversation, Mars was delved into and Elon suggested that to make the planet inhabitable, we should nuke it. Stephen automatically removed the science from Elon’s comment and replied by saying ‘that’s what super villains do.’ But Elon is the furthest from a super villain and this is what he actually meant (although it is actually clear because in the lead up to his comment, he suggests we need to warm the planet so we wouldn’t have to live in domes):

What I was talking about was having a series of very large, by our standards, but very small by calamity standards, essentially having two tiny pulsing suns over the poles. They’re really above the planet. Not on the planet.

Every several seconds send large fusion bombs over the poles. A lot of people don’t appreciate that our sun is a giant fusion explosion.

This was said to a reportedly quiet audience, but what Elon suggests obviously makes sense… There’s quite a bit of carbon dioxide within Mars’ poles acting as dry ice, and CO2, as we all should know, is a global warming agent. So if enough energy is released over the poles of Mars, enough CO2 could be released, warming the atmosphere enough to kickstart a positive feedback loop and a greenhouse effect.

However, super villains have destroyed any positivity that could be associated with nuclear bombs and Elon will probably continue to receive blank, blinking stares for his efforts to explain the Martian terraforming theory to the masses.

Because, Science.

[source: gizmodo]