As an engineer, I just have an interest in how he’ll do this (which he will not definitely) and how it will help humanity on Mars?Elon Musk came with an interesting but controversial idea. The idea proposed making Mars fit for life and subsequent colonization with the help of thermonuclear weapons. On the air of the program, Musk reflected on space travel and ways to colonize Mars. What do you think about it? According to the CEO of SpaceX, colonists on the red planet will have to live in transparent houses until their atmosphere becomes suitable for human habitation. Raising the temperature in the atmosphere of Mars is possible by the nuclear bombardment of the poles, and increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases is a slow way. With the help of SpaceX high resolution cubesat cameras, he wants to film that and show it all around the world. This is a big deal that we can theoretically record such things but I wonder who’ll give him permission to do that? Really mad man but will see how it goes 
It would certainly be cheaper than just bombarding the planet with comets shipped in from the Oort cloud, but I’d be somewhat leery of the long term exposure risks to any settlers…
The nuke the ice caps idea has been around for a long time. I think Kyle Hill even had a video on the subject. Pretty sure it was just one of Elon’s thinking out loud things he does during interviews. Bill’s right, dropping rocks onto the caps would be better, but we don’t have the technology to do that yet.
Underground tunnels would be a fine habitat that doesn’t require massive amounts of materials to be imported. A human ant colony is not sexy but to me it seems highly practical. Robots do 99% of the surface work while the operators are comfortable and safe underground.
Now if only someone were working on an economical means of boring underground tunnels…
There is a lot of room underground here on earth. Just sayin’.
Absolutely.
There is a higher cost to being underground and the circumstances have to justify it, which already makes sense in dense cities and cold places like Toronto. Lowering the cost means new marginal opportunities begin to make sense. Tunnels for transportation are easy to understand, but IMO the real opportunity is commercial or residential space. But it may take time for people to get used to the idea.
Yea, but Elon want’s us multiplanetary. Tunnels on Earth won’t help us much if we get hit by another big rock.
If we are able to move rocks to hit the poles on mars, we should be able to move rocks away from the earth.
Even after an asteroid hit earth, my guess is that it would be more habitable than mars (The end of the dinosaurs was pretty bad, but mammals and fungus survived).
It’s not really worth arguing about though. Someday there will be humans on mars. And almost any problem is 1e6 to 1e9 times easier to solve here than there.
The big problem is seeing them in time.
SpaceX is innovation, cutting-edge focus, one of the leaders for technological advances and missions as well.
They have the ability to do the technological tests and run enormous missions at the same time (would it be richness and power).
Numerous tests, engineering refinements and tests again, all the precautions to eliminate any failure. The projects are confident enough to state the timelines and costs. There are too many uncertainties for the plans to be very precise. There is uncertainty on any new uncertainties to come across even.
Colonization, terraforming? After 1000 years with the pace as it goes now. There are a lot of hypotheses which are proposed and discussed.
But there are many obvious tasks that have to be solved first:
- Placing a reliable station on Mars for exploration at least with robots; currently it is hard to say where it is safe due to meteor collisions.
- Sending technological updates to the exploration systems.
- Investigating possibilities of a human staying in a station. What will be the infrastructure? Will it be shifts or one way flights? When?
What I’ve read for Musk’s plan closely parallels the “Mars Direct” plan outlined in the book “The Case for Mars”
Some of the technology that is available to SpaceX is a little better than what was in the book, because that was all based on technology that eisted at the time of writing.
We should assume that the technology concept to go from the Earth to Mars is quite narrow with options.
Who rides the bald missions also counts, I believe 
Just a reminder. We don’t come here to talk any politics. There are plenty of other forums for that.
That was a good tweet though. Musk is like Jobs was. He doesn’t take a paycheck. Most of his wealth is locked up in stock, or stock options. Until you sell the stock, you don’t pay taxes on it.
Downtown Minneapolis, MN is probably the closest thing you’ll find to commercial and residential tunnel systems.
They are called “SkyWays” and they connect buildings by enclosed bridges at the second floor. Minneapolis boasts the largest continuous system of interconnected buildings in the world. I believe there are some longer walking bridge/tunnel systems but they are broken up so you are forced outdoors at some point from end to end.
I lived in a SkyWay connected condo in Minneapolis for 3 years. My work was in a connected building, my condo building had a full-service restaurant and bar in the hotel below, there’s a Target store connected, there once was a Macy’s connected but it has since closed. The MN Twins OUTDOOR stadium is even connected, allowing one to walk to the ballpark and see the game without actually going outdoors by staying in the restaurant/bar areas.
There were several times in the winter when I realized that I hadn’t actually been outside in a couple of weeks! It was the perfect life for a younger single guy.
I’m sorry about that, I just thought the tweet was funny.
They have stuff like that in Louisville too.
There was a 99 percent invisible podcast about those. I had only seen them in mighty ducks before that.
The Mighty Ducks is primarily in St. Paul though. They have some skyways but not nearly as extensive as Minneapolis.