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Watch Elon Musk tell Colbert his insane plan to make Mars habitable

Published Sep 10th, 2015 6:30PM EDT

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Elon Musk, the mad genius behind both Tesla and SpaceX, wants to see humanity colonize Mars. The problem, of course, is that Mars is not exactly hospitable to human life and will need to undergo some kind of terraforming procedure before we can settle there. In an interview with Stephen Colbert this week, Musk revealed that he has an insane plan to make Mars habitable that involves nuclear weapons.

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When asked by Colbert about living on Mars, Musk acknowledged that the planet was “a bit of a fixer upper” and that we’ll need to live inside climate-controlled domes on the planet when we first start living on it. But when it came time to talk about terraforming Mars, Musk started to get a little scary.

“Eventually you could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet,” Musk said. “You’d warm it up… the fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons of the [North and South] poles.”

Uh, yikes?

Colbert was somewhat taken aback by this and told Musk “that’s what a super villain does!”

Check out the whole video below.

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.