Story highlights
- Elon Musk tells Stephen Colbert that nuclear bombs could bring about Mars climate change
- Scientists are not pleased with the idea
(CNN)Never let it be said that Elon Musk isn't full of ideas.
The man who gave us the Tesla electric car, who has big plans for his SpaceX rocket company and who has proposed the tantalizing Hyperloop dropped another bomb during his appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on Wednesday.
Almost literally.
Musk, a proponent of traveling to Mars, noted that the Red Planet is currently a "fixer-upper" but could be made habitable for humans.
"First, you're going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can warm it up," he said.
The warming could happen quickly or slowly, he added. The quick way?
"Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk said.
Colbert, who had been trying to figure out whether Musk was a superhero or supervillain, decided on the latter after the exchange -- an opinion echoed, tongue in cheek, on social media.