During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Wednesday night, SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a comment that raised a lot of eyebrows.
Musk, a longtime advocate of Mars colonization, told Colbert that the “fast way” to make the planet livable for humans would be to, “drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”
While that might sound like a plan cooked up by Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom, there is actually a lot of merit to the idea.
There are three major factors that make Mars hostile to life: 1) it’s extremely cold; 2) it’s extremely dry (virtually no liquid water); and 3) the atmosphere has very little oxygen. Luckily, problems 2 and 3 could be solved by focusing on problem #1: heating Mars up.
Mars’ polar ice caps are key because they contain roughly equal parts carbon dioxide and water (in the form of ice). Nuking the poles would vaporize these materials, releasing them into the Martian atmosphere. As the atmosphere thickened, the greenhouse effect would start to kick in, trapping heat from the Sun. NBC News explains,
“That would continue heating up the planet, releasing more carbon dioxide, setting off a chain reaction until, ideally, the surface pressure of Mars would increase enough for liquid water to exist — making it much more habitable for oxygen-producing plants.”
Mars’ northern ice cap (Courtesy of NASA)
Michael Shara, curator of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History, thinks the idea is definitely feasible. According to Shara, there are other ways to heat up the poles, like guiding asteroids into them or covering them with a black dust that would absorb heat from the Sun.
He stressed, however, that nuclear weapons would likely be the most cost effective solution, adding that modern nukes can be designed to have very little nuclear fallout.
But theory is sometimes much different than reality. The truth is that we’ve never experimented with starting a greenhouse effect chain reaction, and even the most advanced computer simulations have difficulty predicting how the experiment would play out.
And while the chances are low, there’s also a possibility that Mars’ ice caps could contain microorganisms that we have yet to discover.
“It’s a clever idea in principle. Whether it would really work, I don’t think anyone has worked up the physics in enough detail to say it would,”
says Shara.
Read more from NBC News.