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Drafting committee
On Thursday, Elon Musk revisited his 2015 suggestion to terraform Mars by destroying the hell of its poles.
Even then, the idea was scientifically questionable – research has shown that Musk's plan would only raise Mars's atmospheric pressure to seven percent of Earth's. Now the mathematician Robert Walker calculates on the blog Science 2.0 that if we wanted to make Mars habitable by nuclear explosions, we would need to send what amounts to a bomb assembly line on the red planet and blow it up 3,500 every day for about seven weeks – bad news for Musk's ambitious terraforming plans.
Big boom
Walker based his argument on Musk's clarification that he wanted to create "mini-suns" near the Mars ice caps through prolonged nuclear explosions. As Walker writes, the brightest part of a nuclear explosion lasts about 50 seconds.
If we tried to melt the ice sheets of Mars with artificial sunscreens made of nuclear bomb, that would mean the construction, launch and detonation of 1,728 bombs per pole every day, without fail, for a total of 3,456 bombs . From a perspective perspective, it's almost twice as many bombs as the United States currently has in its entire arsenal.
And this without going into another small problem: the process would probably turn Mars into a nuclear waste inhabitable uninhabitable because of all the radiation it would emit.
READ MORE: Nuclear weapons can never terraform Mars – One million nuclear weapons can not do it – Elon Musk's Sci. Fi Teeshirts[[[[Science 2.0]
More on terraforming: The facts: It would take thousands of years to colonize Mars
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