Establishing human civilization on Mars has been a long-cherished dream of thousands of space scientists and science fiction fans all over the world. For ages, living on Mars has continued to be a distant dream for many but could only be realized in the imaginary world of comics and fiction. With his SpaceX Mars Mission, SpaceX founder and billionaire Elon Musk seems to be adamant on putting mankind on Mars at the earliest possible.
Elon Musk on Nuking Mars
Most recent among his radical thoughts has been the idea of nuking Mars and not just as a random joke. It seems the SpaceX CEO is serious about it. The idea behind SpaceX Mars mission, if you missed it, is to transform Mars into a planet that can habituate humans. But the idea of putting nuclear bombs on the red planet to warm its atmosphere still appears absurd and risky to most. But definitely not to the billionaire entrepreneur.
Here is what he tweeted:
Musk recently posted in a Twitter thread about the idea of nuking Mars in order to warm the planet. His first tweet read, “Might make sense to have thousands of solar reflector satellites to warm Mars vs. artificial suns (tbd)”. He further explained, “Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low fallout nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial suns. Much like our sun, this would not cause Mars to become radioactive.”
How the idea came about
He had first proposed the idea of warming the red planet during his appearance on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ in 2015. He had said that vaporizing the ice caps on Mars would be a good way to warm the planet for human inhabitation.
He had initially twitted “Nuke Mars!” and then “T-shirt soon” earlier this month. The ‘Nuke Mars’ T-shirts are already available for sale on their official website. Although, the billionaires and space enthusiasts might be more than happy over the prospects of Space serving as the real estate of the future, Musk’s idea of creating artificial sun by nuking Mars has drawn sharp criticism from the scientific community.
T-Shirts available already?
SpaceX CEO had earlier suggested the idea of creating two artificial “suns” by launching a nuclear bomb every couple of seconds to melt its CO2 reserves. Scientists had earlier warned in 2018 about the probability that Mars might be lacking the necessary levels of CO2 to adequately warm its atmosphere. They had further added that the atmosphere of Mars is too thin to retain much of the CO2 released through the nuclear reactions.
Twitter reacts to the idea
In his defense, Elon Musk had replied to a Twitter user, “Not risky imo & can be adjusted/improved real-time. Essentially need to figure out most effective way to convert mass to energy, as Mars is slightly too far from this solar system’s fusion reactor (the sun) (sic).” It is yet to be seen how successful SpaceX will be in its Mars mission, for the time being you must stay aware of the fact that you definitely can’t buy any land on space as yet. Talking about the space as potential real estate, you might be tempted to buy land on Mars from various websites that claim to have legal rights to give you the ownership on Mars, other planets and their natural satellites. But, since none of these websites own the space or any of these planets, they definitely can’t sell you any. So, you might just save yourself those extra bucks.
What do you think of the SpaceX Mars Mission? Tell us in the comments below!