It was a few months ago when Elon Musk had suggested that exploding nuclear bombs on Mars would kick-start an atmosphere there to support life on the red planet. Now Major League Baseball former MVP Jose Canseco has added that he supports Musk's idea that by increasing the temperature of Mars, it would have similar conditions to Earth and would thereby be suitable for living organisms.
Canseco decided to share his calculations on his Twitter. "By my calculations if we nuked the polar ice caps on Mars we would make an ocean of 36 feet deep across the whole planet," he said. He also believes that by colliding "Saturn's moon Triton" with Mars, it will fire a magnetic field, according to CNET.
Yes i DID think about the missing magnetic field. It is created when the Triton collision liquidates Mars outer core into molten iron.
— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) December 11, 2015
However, Triton is Neptune's moon, not Saturn's. Canseco also noted that there was a distinct similarity in Musk's and his "great minds," referring to Musk's contribution towards the idea of making Mars inhabitable on "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert back in early September. Musk did suggest that using thermonuclear weapons would be a good way to increase the temperature on Mars, but scientists had also stressed at that time that the amount of energy required for a feat such as that would have to be larger than the energy produced by the largest nuclear bomb ever built, according to Inquistr.
Musk has been at the helm of numerous initiatives in technology and science, and despite Canseco's rather funnily received endorsement of Musk's idea, there are numerous other undertakings that he has taken on while his current ones don't seem to have taken off quite yet.
On being asked if it's possible for Triton to collide with Mars in order to create a magnetic field, numerous astrobiologists shut down the theory, with Kevin Casting of Pennsylvania State University saying, "... it's unlikely that colliding Triton into Mars at any velocity could melt Mars' core and restart the magnetic dynamo. Triton is about 1/30th of Mars' mass, so most of the energy of the collision would likely go into vaporizing Triton itself, along with a fair chunk of Mars' mantle. I doubt if the core would be greatly affected."
Some people won't be taking Canseco's far-fetched ideas into account any time soon, since he has a history of violence charges against him including a violent felony as well as domestic violence, according to For The Win.
