October 03, 2015
Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to colonize and, perhaps, travel to Mars. Now, the possible discovery of liquid water on the red planet has reenergized his affection for it and now he's trying to clarify his idea for heating up the planet with nuclear bombs. Musk's goal isn't to blow up Mars in the hopes of heating it up enough for livability. No, he wants to launch fusion bombs into the sky over Mars' two poles to create tiny pulse suns. These suns would be similar to our own sun, but would only last for a short while. Musk outlined his plan on Friday during the SolarCity solar panel launch event in Manhattan when I asked him if he was excited about the discovery of water on Mars. He said, "Yeah, that's good," and then launched into a relatively detailed explanation of his plan.
"What I was talking about," said Musk, "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."
Those suns will be created by a technology that doesn't yet exist. "Every several seconds," Musk continued “send large fusion bombs over the poles." Those bombs would "blink out, like a small sun" and then you could send up more to keep going with the process, Musk added.
The room, was dead silent as Musk dug into what sounded too many in the room like science fiction. "A lot of people don’t appreciate that our sun is a giant fusion explosion."
Why would you want two suns over Mars?
"So if you have two basically tiny suns over the pole that would warm up the planet," explained Musk, "Then you would gasify frozen carbon dioxide, thicken the atmosphere and warm up the water and all of that would have a greenhouse effect. Have a cascading effect to continue warming up the planet."