NASA is famous for its exploration and discovery in space! However, the agency is also making discoveries under the Earth, right here on the planet! One of such is the strange new discovery under Antarctica's ice that changes the way scientists have viewed the planet! What has NASA discovered? And does it affect you? Join us as we dive into NASA's strange new discovery under Antarctica's ice!

Space…the final frontier that is yet to be conquered by humanity. The race to make humankind a multi-planetary species is being led by SpaceX. Elon Musk was the first to envision that the next step to human progress was to conquer the stars and colonize another planet. Elon Musk chose the red planet ―Mars as the first target for human colonization. In 2017, when Elon first proposed this huge undertaking, his goal was to get the first boots on the ground on Mars by 2022. Since then, Elon has pulled back to a more realistic 2024 timeline to reach the Red Planet. Let bore deeper into Elon Musk’s Insane New Plan to reach Mars by 2024.
Starship: a Big Falcon Rocket
After first revealing his plans to land on the red planet and colonize it. The first challenge Elon musk faced was how to get people and cargo there. Mars is not really in our immediate neighborhood; it is on average about a whopping 140 million miles away from earth. This is a huge distance to cover for a human-bearing rocket. Just to give scale to this distance, the moon is about 240,000 miles away.
But the silver lining to this is that Mars and Earth's orbits do come very close to each other periodically, this event happens every two years. The event is called a close approach when Earth and Mars are nearest to each other. At this point, the distance between our home and the red planet is about 33.9 million miles. The next close approach will happen in the winter of 2022. Hence Elon Musk’s original timeline for a 2022 target for the first mission to Mars. The windows after that will happen in 2024,2026, 2026, and so on.
With these goals and timelines in mind, SpaceX started the development of the Big Falcon Rocket. This would be a 180-foot-tall spaceship, including three protruding fins, that sits atop a 230-foot-tall rocket booster. The plan was to make the rocket fully reusable and cut down the cost of each launch significantly.
In November of 2018, the project was renamed Big Falcon Heavy to Starship. This is a two-stage rocket and is composed of a booster stage named Super Heavy and a second stage, which is the Starship itself.
Starship is currently being powered by its Raptor engines, which can produce a thrust of 2 Mega Newtons. Starship is designed with the ability to re‑enter Earth's atmosphere and land on a designated landing pad. The spacecraft is also designed to be able to perform automatic rendezvous and docking operations and on‑orbit propellant transfer between Starships.
SpaceX’s facility at Boca Chica in Texas is developing the current generation of Starship Model SN15. Which has been named the Starbase. Since it is planned to host the facility to mass manufacture SpaceXs starships. The plan is to build 1000 starships over 10 years once the facility starts its mass manufacturing process, that is around 100 Starships every year!

One small step for a human, one giant leap for humankind

Elon Musk in January revealed he had plans to get 1 million people on Mars by 2050. To achieve this ambitious goal, he has plans to launch at average 3 starships a day. But before we talk about colonization, let us look at the first manned mission to Mars.
We have already successfully landed unmanned missions to Mars. In fact, our first successful landing was in 1971 when the Soviet Unions Mars 3 mission landed on the red planet. Since then we have had multiple mars, rovers roaming the red planet collecting scientific data. But transporting a human crew to and back from Mars is a whole new challenge.
The first obstacle is the time since the distance to the red planet is very large. This means very long mission times for the human crew to be shut inside a cabin being hurled through space. The shorter Mars mission plans have round-trip flight times of 400 to 450 days. These can even be cut shorter with 245 days round trip by using on-orbit staging methods. These are still very long periods to sustain living conditions for the astronauts.
SpaceX’s crewed Mars flight looks something like this.
Phase 1, Starship launches with Super Heavy booster. Booster separates after delivering Starship to orbit and returns to Earth for future reuse.
Phase II, Starship enters Earth’s orbit while a refilling tanker launches to mate with Starship in orbit. Starship then uses tanker vehicles (essentially the Starship spacecraft minus the windows) to refill the Starship spacecraft in low-Earth orbit prior to departing for Mars. Refilling on-orbit enables the transport of up to 100 tons all the way to Mars. Tanker after refueling returns to earth, for future reuse.

Stephen Hawking believed humans needed to vacate Earth in order to avoid annihilation.
He wrote that climate change and the looming possibility of a nuclear war put humans in grave danger.
Mars, or as you may call it, the Red Planet is indeed our neighbor.
And when we think of it, we imagine a ferociously hot planet, full of deadly gases and – to some, aliens of various sorts.
However, contrary to popular belief, it is unbearably cold – pertaining to its distance from the sun.
Its average distance from the Sun is a whopping 247 million kilometers!
.. which means that there is not enough sunlight to sustain human life and maintain a habitable temperature.
With an average temperature of -80 degrees Fahrenheit or -60 degrees Celsius, the Red Planet is -12 degree Celsius colder than Antarctica’s average climate.

And though there is zero evidence of biological life on the Red Planet, the planet used to
have essential elements that contribute to Mars' suitability for life.

Regardless of this obvious challenge to humankind’s ambitions to inhabit Mars, Elon Musk is ever ready to come up with new solutions that might seem utopian to many people.
One of such ideas is to nuke mars, yes! You read that right.
NUKE Mars with the intention of Terraforming it.
Though Mars and Earth are similar in some characteristics, one notable difference between the two planets of our interest is that Mars is not capable of causing the Greenhouse Effect!
Now, this may come as a shocker to a few of you that Mars is unable to do that because the planet is composed mainly of Carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
The catch is that some theories suggest that most of the Red Planet’s Carbon dioxide has vanished while a fraction of that has been absorbed into Mars’ polar ice caps.
Also, the planet has very thin air, unfamiliar to the people of Earth, which implies that the idea of roaming around the new home without a life gear would be a foolish idea.

Coming onto Musk again, the space enthusiast does not find the absence of a human-friendly atmosphere and the absence of greenhouse effect as a deal-breaker.

He suggests that these challenges would serve to humanity’s benefit by forcing them to innovate and think outside the box.

So how exactly can one make Mars inhabitable?

To terraform Mars would mean to convert the Red Planet into a livable one.

Though NASA in 2018 disagreed with Musk’s idea that Mars could be altered to sustain human life, he disagreed and in 2019, reiterated the belief that the current atmospheric condition of the planet can be tampered with.

As indicated by a public statement by NASA, the current Martian air itself comprises generally of carbon dioxide, it is extremely thin and cold to sustain fluid water.

On Mars, the pressure of the air is less than one percent compared to the pressure of Earth's atmosphere. Any fluid water on a superficial level would rapidly vanish or freeze.

Musk intends to go ahead with his eccentric plans and nuke the Red Planet’s CO2 deposits.

Nuking Martian polar ice caps will thicken the planet’s atmosphere and will increase its temperature which would lead to a greenhouse effect like that on Earth.

This would help keep the harmful Ultraviolet Radiation away from the atmosphere and may trigger a chain reaction that would generate water.

To make this possible, Elon Musk needs around 10 to 15 thousand nukes to strike our neighboring planet.

A brief example of the devastation a single nuclear device can cause can be the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where more than a hundred thousand people vanished into thin air.

By using this method, Elon Musk believes that humans would be able to colonize Mars by 2050.

However, he is not planning to attack the planet, yet.

He has made it unambiguous that he will detonate the nukes just right above the Martian poles specifically.

The following non-radioactive explosions will then replicate the Sun’s heat artificially which will melt the polar ice caps that contain carbon dioxide reserves that date back to at least 4 billion years!

If done correctly, the idea of humans walking around the Red Planet as shown in films like ‘Martian’ would not be that of a distant dream.

Now all of it must have made you ponder whether the plan comes with zero risks and the answer is clear...

NO.

It is full of things that could go wrong and one of those possibilities is the occurrence of a nuclear winter that may follow suit after the successful detonation of more than about ten to fifteen thousand nuclear devices.

Contrary to what Musk intends, a nuclear winter can cause an aggressive period of cooling lead by the blocking of direct

What if we told you that you exist in another universe that you are not aware of? While that may sound scary, it is not impossible to find a copy of you or your loved one living in an entirely different universe! This is because of the theory of multiple or parallel universes. However, while some scientists dismissed the theory as fiction, more proof is coming in about the existence of these alternate universes! What are parallel universes, and how do they affect you? All these and much more as we dive into how scientists finally found proof for the existence of parallel universes!