Colonizing the great red planet Mars

If you had the chance to colonizing Mars. What would you do to make the planet habitual, would you bring plants, animals, even people? Do you think it would be could to build civilizations on the planet? Can you imagine Mars being the new Earth. Maybe even changing the name of the planet. What would life be like, how would we use the raw materials, and how would we respond to a natural disaster or meteor impact?
I'm all in favor colonizing the planet. Turning it from reddish orange, to a appearance similar to earth's. Building small human civilizations to allow people a place to live, while they take care of the life of the planet and the planet its self.

If the world wasn't going after itself (each country) We could get together and build massive ships in orbit and zip over to Mars and build colonies like nobodies business.

We could kick start the red planet again and have us another home.

reply to post by Romantic_Rebel


To terraform Mars would require, eventually, all of those things...People, plants, animals in a dizzying variety.

How to do it is the question though...

There is no real question of "Can we do it." The technology to do it is there, all that's missing is the "want to" that took us to the Moon.

I'm in favor of it. It's a challenge to our entire species. But the challenge wouldn't be much different than the one the lead to man colonizing our own world long ago out of Africa. The same needs, and wants, will drive this effort that drove that effort.

The desire to find new, possibly better, places to live. To see what's over that next horizon. To see the sun rise from a new, strange place. This is what will drive it. Gene Roddenberry said it best, "To boldly go where no man has gone before..."

I'd go in a heart beat.

The technical aspects are understood by many scientists, and not so scientists...though I'm not amongst them. I trust that they'll know what to do. I'll go along to say "Wow, that's sooooo cool."

A lot....

Before we start the enormous work of transforming Mars into an Earth... lets wait to learn if the Kepler satellite can find any other 'existing' Earth's. It's findings are due in less than 2 years.

reply to post by Romantic_Rebel


full terraforming of mars, as opposed to just constructing pressurized complexes, would be a long process but totally do-able.


you have to start however with constructing a whole new food chain, starting with bacteria and other microorganisms to do many things including converting the perchlorates in the soil into gases or some kind of fertilizer and converting converting carbon dioxide into oxygen( through photosynthesis).

after that is started you next have to start thickening the atmosphere and warming the planet. the best way to do both fastest is to do so via aerobraking waterbearing comets and/or asteroids, essentially skipping them off the atmosphere so that the water and other trace gasses are melted and absorbed by the atmosphere without having to worry about massive damage like you would with direct planetary strikes.

well suffice it to say it's highly complicated, but is totally possible. it is also something that we really need to get started on, heck the next asteroid we spot may just be an ELE headed straight at us. wouldn't we feel foolish if we never did anything to spread our species past our planet and everyone died.....

reply to post by Larryman


why wait? any of those worlds is going to be decades to thousands of years away with our current tech, whereas mars is a fraction of that.

reply to post by Romantic_Rebel



It's a good question, "how would we change Mars"?

There is a good documentary called "Mars the new home for humanity and then beyond"

If you haven't seen it it's worth watching as it deals with that question on how we could change Mars into a planet human's can live on, it’s quite old so you may well have seen it.



The other part of it here: Part 2

It's saying if we first pollute the planet we can then create an atmosphere, they would do this by introducing terraforming machines on the surface to start the work, this would be well in advance of any Humans going there to live.

The other question is: would we look after the planet or rape it like we have the Earth?

the thing i dont get is:

mars has an iron core like ours. the core had molten iron as well. This created the magnetic field around mars that protected the planet from the sun's deadly solar flares, radiation, etc.

A long time ago, it stopped spinning, the magnetic field gradually wore away leaving the planet unprotected. The atmosphere was blown off into space. Without the atmosphere, the water evaporated, plants and animals(if there ever were any) died off, and the wind eroded what was left. The planet then looked as it does today.

So, by putting plants, animals, and even creating an atmosphere back on mars wouldn't really last long if it worked, because it would just be destroyed like it was previously. I think the only way would be to jump-start the core to create a new magnetic field. But even this isn't smart, because the planet is too far away from the sun to keep the core alive due to the cold temps. It was much hotter when the planets were forming. So in the end, I don't think we can ever truly colonize mars in the way a lot of people think.

I fail to see a point in it. I mean, we've destroyed this earth, so we'll just do the same thing to mars.

reply to post by 711Savior


i dislike resurrecting an essentially dead thread, BUT! i just saw this on another website and had to post it in response to this old thread to those who think we're pretty safe here and don't need to expand out into the solar system and beyond to not only ensure the survival of our species but as many other species on our planet as possible.

this video, best viewed at youtube so you can see the year and counter, shows all the asteroids discovered in the solarsystem since 1980. roughly 5 million of them. green are asteroids away from us with little chance of hitting us, yellow more of a chance, and red obviously worrisome asteroids.




notice all the reds at the end?? yeah that's why we need to start expanding. should have started shortly after we made it to the moon. and to those who invariably always cry " but we treat this planet like crap why should we ruin another one!?" it's difficult to change infrastructure over to less polluting means, it's also very costly, that's why we have such a hard time of it here. However when colonizing another planet we'd be starting from scratch, immensely easier and cheaper all around to get proper low environmentally impactfull infrastructure.

[edit on 31-8-2010 by optimus primal]

to truely get to grips with how to terra-form mars we need to get all the facts all the information and we first need to go ther
if thers buildings and structures ther allready we can back engineer them to our needs
the goverment hide information about things we understand ???