Last month, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, threatened to go full supervillain by revealing his Lex Luthor-esque plan to detonate a series of thermonuclear devices on the surface of Mars in an effort to, seemingly counterintuitively, make the planet habitable for human life. Musk has now elucidated on his idea, explaining that the nuclear detonations would effectively create artificial “suns” above the surface of each pole of the Red Planet, which he has previously described as “a fixer upper of a planet,” and one that he is determined to colonise.
“They’re really above the planet, they’re not on the planet,” Musk disclosed during an event for Solar City at Times Square in New York, adding, “A lot of people don’t appreciate that our Sun is a large fusion explosion.” A series of detonations would occur at regular intervals to maintain the heat and light of these man-made suns, the heat from which should melt any frozen CO2, creating a planetary atmosphere that would absorb and trap heat to support a habitable climate.
Musk was asked how difficult his audacious plan would implement. He responded, “Yeah, absolutely, no problem,” to much laughter from the event’s crowd.
Thank you The Verge for providing us with this information.
