ASPEN, Colo. — "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.
How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade-by-decade planetary facelift of Mars — a technique called terraforming — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on."
Humans: a terraforming species
"I suggest that the near-term outlook is that Mars will be terraformed," Wood said, adding that he thinks the effort will be seriously underway by the middle of this century and essentially complete by the end of the 21st century..."
The man is on drugs. Using the absolute best technology we could muster, then toss in some fudge-factoring for hi-tech we do not yet have but someday might, terraforming Mars would take at least 1000 years and that's the quick way. Diverting asteroids to pummel the Martian crust, releasing CO2 from melting icecaps as well as from underground icefields. Trillions of cubic tons of earthworms, of algae and mosses, seeding the planet after decades of hundreds upon hundreds of fusion-powered plants dumping oxygen and nitrogen into the atmosphere because the Martian air needs to get 10 times more dense just to keep an earthworm alive. 1000 years with quantum leaps of technology. 7000-8000 years with what we have now.
I do so despise men of science who sell out in the hope of generating interest in what might some day be possible but never, ever, as easy as all that.
Just don't buy any cheap Martian real estate from this man. Long term investments are terrific but please now.
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