Month: October 2015

It’s Official, Elon Musk Is Now a Bond Villain

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On Colbert last night, Elon Musk, internet tycoon turned electronic car manufacturer turned space entrepreneur wants to colonize Mars, unleashed a literal bombshell:

The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors appeared on the second episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last night (Sept. 9) to discuss his various business ventures. Colbert asked him about his plan to send people to Mars, which Musk described as a “fixer-up” of a planet. That led to this exchange:

“Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earthlike planet,” Musk said. “By warming it up.”

“With a blanket?” Colbert asked.

No, Stephen, not with a blanket. With a great number of thermonuclear bombs:

Musk has publicly supported this idea for a long time, but we’d wager it’s the first time anyone’s suggested it on a late-night talk show. The idea is that the nukes would melt the Mars’ polar ice caps and kickstart a greenhouse effect—similar to the one we’re currently experiencing on Earth—that would quickly make the planet warmer.

I will make a couple of points here:

  • First, you can get the same sort of effect, sans radiation, by dispersing a few tons of carbon black on the poles.  The increased albedo does the rest.
  • Second, this really is Bond villain nuts. Batsh%$ insane

Nestle Launches Mission to Mars

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No, Nestle is not actually flying to Mars. That’s just a snarky reference to Nestle’s sucking water out of California in orderto bottle it.

When juxtaposed with some of Nestle’s earlier behavior, the news that NASA’s discovery that there are current water flows on Mars, it is an obvious bit of humor:

Spectroscopic data from NASA

’s 10-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed years of scientific suspicion that periodic dark streaks appearing on Martian slopes are the result of liquid water flowing on the planet’s surface.

The dark features, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), have been observed for years by the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and have appeared on dozens of sites at Mars. This imagery was later correlated with mineral mapping by another instrument, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which determined that the dark streaks are hydrated minerals — i.e., thin patches of damp soil. The salt lowers the freezing point of the water, allowing it to persist longer in Mars’ thin, cold atmosphere.

“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science and a former space shuttle astronaut, during a Sept. 28 press conference. “Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past. Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars.”

This is actually rather significant.

Where there is water, on Earth at least, there is life.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the picture.