Much has been said in the media about terraforming lately about Terraforming Mars. Spacex, after all was basically formed for the purpose. On the other hand, the idea of turning a dry and dusty rock into a new eden is extremely bold, even arrogant. For a start, to Terraform Mars, probably the most earth-like planet in the solar system, we would need for a start to reinduce a Martian electromagnetic field, thicken the Martian atmosphere and remove it’s CO2, and bake the poisons out of the Martian soil. In the long run, a complex, planet wide biological ecosystem would have to be created and engineered to ensure resilience. This would likely take thousands of years, and confirming that the system could withstand major problems would take even longer. However, these reasons alone should not prevent us from undertaking the project. After all, medieval societies worked for hundreds of years during a time when the average lifespan was around 30, in order to construct Cathedrals that would have little to no effect on their welfare. To understand whether Terraforming is a prophet’s vision or a baldy thought out daydream destined for failure, we must look to the history of the idea.
Terraforming began as a branch of science with the holding of the first Mars Underground conference by a few graduate students in the 1980’s. The conference grew exponentially, becoming a major institution among those who wished to push humanity to Mars. Despite this, terraforming did not become popular to the general public until a space entrepreneur named Elon Musk began performing feats that not even NASA could do. In general, many believe that some method of mining the comets, asteroid, or rings of Saturn must be employed in order to extract sufficient amounts of water for use in providing a livable atmosphere, and also that some type of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gas must be pumped into the atmosphere of Mars to thicken it and warm up the planet. All of the modifications that must be done to Mars have recieved criticism from basic scientists, particularly the exobiologists(biologists for off earth organisms) that hope to study any past or present Martian life forms. This is because these modifications would almost certainly make Mars impossible for native-Martians organisms to survive on. However, Terraforming is not the only way of changing a planet.
Another way of changing a planet to make it more hospitable to humans is called Aereforming, and was proposed by Science Fiction writer and novelist Ben Bova. Bova proposed slowly changing the Martian environment toward one not similar to earth, but similar to how Mars was many thousands of years ago. The slow changing of the environment would give any native Martian organisms plenty of time to evolve, and in any case, they and genetically modified variants of their would be essential to causing the change. Bova’s proposal suffers one major flaw of probably taking thousands of years before even any evidence of change can be measured. However, fuller knowledge of any Martian biosphere may allow this type of project to proceed much faster through the genetic modification of successive Martian organisms. The plan also has far more of a chance to work as it works with, rather than against Mars, and facilitates use of Martian organisms naturally developed survival mechanisms. This type of project would probably be intermixed with a more traditional type of Terraforming and in any case shows great promise. It is only those who can live within an environment that will survive, rather than those who love against it.