The Wild Plan to Terraform Mars by Slamming Asteroids Into It

It’s often the case that the more that planets are studied and understood, the more remote the possibility of inhabiting them seems. Mars, for example, is the closest celestial body to Earth in terms of distance, but data shows its conditions are extremely hostile for life. Despite this, NASA has plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet, and Elon Musk is a vocal proponent of establishing a human presence there. In the short term, the solution to colonizing Mars is the construction of special enclosed habitats. But in the long term, some have suggested a more ambitious strategy. Space colonization enthusiasts propose terraforming Mars—that is, transforming the planet to acquire characteristics similar to those of Earth. Scientists accept that any proposal for terraforming Mars is decades away, although calculations are already underway to assess how this titanic process might work. Leszek Czechowski, a professor at the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has p ... Read full article.