Elon Musk wants to nuke the Martian ice caps, in order to release CO2 and warm the place up.

Making Mars habitable is a goal of some very smart people, mostly because one day — either due to environmental disaster, an expanding sun, or any other number of disaster scenarios — the Earth will become uninhabitable.

But is nuking Mars really the best way to create a new Earth?

Why it might work

Right now, Mars seems like a dry, dead planet. But its polar ice caps contain about equal parts water and carbon dioxide.

Nuclear weapons could be used to vaporize them, releasing those materials into the atmosphere. Once the atmosphere got thick enough, the greenhouse effect would kick in: energy from the sun, absorbed by the planet and released as infrared radiation, would be trapped.

That would continue heating up the planet, releasing more carbon dioxide, setting off a chain reaction until, ideally, the surface pressure of Mars would increase enough for liquid water to exist — making it much more habitable for oxygen-producing plants.

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

Would Elon Musk’s Plan to Nuke Mars Actually Work? – NBC News