So far several experts have kept forward their idea to nuke Mars, but when the similar idea was kept forward by SpaceX founder Elon Musk it suddenly grabbed attention of several people. Elon Musk shared his idea on the ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’.

By doing so, Musk aims to ‘terraform’ the red planet so that it can become habitable for coming generations of humans. It is like fixer-upper of a planet and eventually one could transform Mars into an earth-like planet, Musk told Colbert.

It is known that scientists and science experts have been thinking to make Mars habitable, mostly because one day, either due to environmental disaster, an expanding sun, or any other number of disaster scenarios, the Earth will become uninhabitable.

Presently, Mars appears to be a dry and a dead planet. But its polar ice caps contain about equal parts of water and carbon dioxide, said experts.

They said nuclear weapons could be used to vaporize them, releasing those materials into the atmosphere. And once the atmosphere got thick enough, the greenhouse effect would start taking place, where the energy from the sun is absorbed by the planet and is then released as infrared radiation.

This will continue to heat up the planet, releasing more and more carbon dioxide, setting a chain reaction till the time the surface pressure if Mars would increase enough for liquid water to exist and making it much more habitable for oxygen-producing plants.

Michael Shara, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s astrophysics department, said, “You could start turning Mars from a red planet into a green planet”.