Mars, the Green Planet?

By | June 25, 2007
2 Comments

This has to be the most optimistic assessment for Mars’ potential I’ve ever read:

Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century’s end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

…

“I believe it’s roughly a 50/50 chance that young children now alive will walk on martian meadows…will swim in martian lakes,” Wood said. It is not technology, nor money, he said, the pacing ingredient is marshaled will.

Years ago I read a plan that outlined a 500 year process – sorry I forget where – at the end of which we could walk the planet with small oxygen bottles to suppliment the still-thin atmosphere. Wood’s plan would be better, but I have to wonder whether he’s being realistic.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    He’s being realistic in terms of what could be technically done if Mars mania suddenly hit. But Esther Dyson’s response sums it up. Venture capitalists aren’t going to adopt this project, and I doubt any governments will, either. So how could something of that scale be accomplished?

    Another issue — what if there is life already there? I don’t think we’ll run into any herds of Martian sheep at this point, but even if there are microbes — is it okay for us just to come in and wipe out a whole biosphere with a new one?

  • MDarling

    Nice to know that we are confident we can alter the Martian global atmosphere if only we had the will- makes me think we’ll have less trouble than I thought locally.

    Microbes? Sheep? Eat the sheep, displace the microbes …perhaps into a zoo. Displaced bioshpere- seems like that’s waht we’ve done here. I don’t see any reason why we’d be less ethical to do it on Mars than here on earth.