Terraforming Mars

“The first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth. They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony/settlement, I call it a ‘permanence’.” said, Buzz Aldrin. Humanity is looking for a new home since they are destroying their current home, Earth. The most likely planet that we will move inhabit next is Mars because it is placed in the Habitable Zone but there is one problem, it’s atmosphere.

Mars has remains of an atmosphere but it is insufficient. The lack of an atmosphere makes it hard for water on the surface of the planet to stay in liquid form and makes it impossible to breathe. In order to solve this problem Mars has to be terraformed.

There have been four proposed methods for this process: large orbital mirrors that will reflect sunlight and heat the Mars surface, greenhouse gas-producing factories to trap solar radiation, smashing ammonia-heavy asteroids into the planet to raise the greenhouse gas level and creating artificial suns with nuclear bombs to melt the ice on Mars’ poles. Using nuclear bombs and smashing asteroids are not viable options because it requires 3,456 nuclear bombs per day for 7 weeks and would make Mars inhabitable because of the amount of radiation that this process would leave, and finding asteroids, determining wether they are ammonia-heavy, then redirecting them would consume a lot of time and resources. The other methods are capable of solving the issue with Mars’ atmosphere but are impossible with current technology but as we progress technologically we will be able to start making Mars into a habitable planet and one day our new home.