New Delhi:
American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s idea of bombing Mars's poles four years ago with nuclear bombs could be used to colonise the Red Planet in the future. Musk's idea was to liberate enough water vapour and carbon dioxide to warm the planet substantially.
Appearing on a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, Dr Tyson said: "I don’t think we should think of the idea as a literal thing, but more a general principles of what we want to accomplish. You want to warm it [Mars], you want to protect what could be the future of biochemistry and then you seed it.
"Then you wait, you don’t want to wait too long, you want to wake it up and then you terraform Mars. We think there’s a lot of water that was once on Mars that’s just sitting below in a permafrost.
So, you wouldn’t have to bring water to Mars, or in the distant future we can just redirect a comet and get all the water we need."
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Tyson added that smashing an asteroid into Mars would also be practical. "There are comets everywhere, we know how to do it but there is no real incentive. It happens with or without us as we are in the shooting path of thousands of asteroids and comets. So, what we would do is find one that is heading close to us anyway and in the seventh orbit down the line, or the hundredth orbit down the line.
"Then we would slightly deflect it in such a way that it would then collide with Mars."
Dr Tyson revealed how asteroids may come to help the Earth in the future, the same way many scientists believe they did millions of years ago.
He said: "Or even the Earth if you want, if we needed some more fresh water. The problem is, if something really big that would fill lakes collided with the Earth, that would just be bad for life on the Earth. It’s a spontaneous deposit of energy that could change the climate.
So, you want to do that on a planet you are trying to terraform."
Last month, in a series of tweets, Musk unveiled two T-shirts that have the slogan 'Nuke Mars' on them. As if that wasn't enough, the tech mogul literally flirted with Mars, tagging an account posing as the red planet!
While scientists across the globe have been long researching about the possibility of life on Mars, Musk has altogether a different plan to make the Red Planet habitable for humans - as indicated by his latest post on Twitter. "Nuke Mars!," Musk tweeted adding that t-shirts are coming soon with same message printed on it. For those interested, the t-shirts with "Nuke Mars" tagline are already available on the SpaceX online shop.
However, this is not the first time that the Tesla CEO has shared his idea of bombing Mars with nuclear weapons.
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In an interview at Stephen Colbert’s late-night show in 2015, Musk discuss the same idea to make Mars a livable planet for humans. He also took his 'out of the box' plan to a 2017 journal named New Space detailing how humans could build a 1-million-person colony on Mars in less than a century.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is preparing for a massive asteroid nicknamed 'God of Chaos' which will hurtle close to the earth’s surface, according to reports. The 99942 Apophis asteroid will pass under communication and weather satellites in orbit, travelling at almost 25,000 mph when it rockets past the earth.
The NASA has already begun preparations for the arrival of asteroid 99942 Apophis which will skim past the earth in 10 years. The asteroid measures 340 meters across and will pass within just 19,000 miles of Earth’s surface. Apophis is one of the largest asteroids to pass so close to the Earth’s surface and a collision with the planet has the potential to be devastating for all life on Earth, reported Cape Business News.
