CuriouTech

On Wednesday night, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and announced that the speediest way to terraform Mars and allow humans to live outside of an airlock dome would be to nuke it. "The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk told Colbert, prompting the host to call him a super villain. But is the idea that crazy? The basis of the bomb plot is that the nukes would melt the frozen CO2 on the Red Planet's poles, releasing it as gas into the atmosphere. This would help to thicken up the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, which could be enough to heat the planet and allow water to exist in a liquid form. Essentially, the bombs would kick-start something similar to the global warming that's happening here on Earth, and hopefully trigger a cascade effect - so the more ice that melts, the more CO2 that's released, which warms the planet and melts more ice, and so on. However, there are some