Musk would bomb Mars to make it more habitable

Elon Musk might think it’s a good idea to warm up Mars with thermonuclear weapons so humans can live on it, but scientists are raising red flags about the idea.

The chief executive of Hawthorne rocket maker SpaceX talked about colonizing Mars, among other topics, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Wednesday.

When Colbert asked how he would eventually transform the Red Planet into a livable place, Musk said it would need to be warmed up. The fast way? “Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”

This prompted Colbert to label Musk a “supervillain.”

The average temperature on Mars is similar to that of Antarctica in the winter, said Brian Toon, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who cowrote a paper in 1991 about making the Red Planet habitable.

“It seems possible to make it Earthlike, but there’s a lot of barriers to overcome,” Toon said. “Blowing up bombs is not a good one.”

Thermonuclear weapons could be used to warm the planet, but that might not be enough to warm it to “Earth-like” levels, said Joshua Bandfield, an affiliate associate professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder.

And detonating nuclear weapons on Mars would change the terrain and make it harder to understand how the planet works, he said.

Another idea could be to use greenhouse gases to trap sunlight, which Musk mentioned as the slower way to warm the planet.

Although carbon dioxide could be used to warm up the atmosphere, the amount already existing on Mars is poisonous, making the environment potentially plant-friendly, but not suitable for animals, Toon said.

NASA was a little more coy about Musk’s idea.

In a statement, the space agency said, “We are also committed to promoting exploration of the solar system in a way that protects explored environments as they exist in their natural state.”

Musk, who also heads electric auto manufacturer Tesla and is chairman of solar company SolarCity, has long been fascinated by Mars. SpaceX is hiring researchers knowledgeable about the Red Planet, including former NASA researcher Margarita Marinova, who cowrote a study on how best to “terraform” Mars. (If you don’t read science fiction, terraform means creating a hospitable, Earth-like environment for humans.)