Elon Musk Wants To Nuke Mars And Apparently That Could Be A Good Thing

Mars is what you'd class as a 'fixer-upper' of a holiday home.

It's dusty, barren and cold. Really cold. Like, minus 125 degrees Celsius. It makes a night in the Arctic circle look like a weekend in Las Vegas.

So how do we make it inhabitable? Nuke it. No, really. Pepper it with thermonuclear devices - the equivalent to hitting "High, 30 seconds" on the terraforming microwave.

It's not our idea - it's Elon Musk's. The technology billionaire recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and discussed his views on why colonising Mars is inevitable, and how we might do it quickly.

"At first you are going to have to live in transparent domes but eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet..." Musk explains. "You’d warm it up. Just warm it up... There’s the fast way and the slow way. The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles."

Well, we're not going to argue with that. Largely because we know nothing about the complexities of colonising a distant planet. We rewired a plug once, but that's about our limit.

(Images: NASA)