The Pros And Cons Of Terraforming Mars

It is believed that between the years 2040 and 2050 humans will overpopulate the Earth, which would mean we will need a second home. Although, is colonizing Mars the best location for humans to start a new home? For starters, colonizing the moon would be a much more efficient second home. Terraforming Mars is very tedious and challenging process with many methods that are only theoretical. Mars is a very costly project that will cost organizations and investors a metric ton of money. Those who are obsessed with colonizing Mars would tell you how it could save the human race, it won't fail, it’s worth the cost, and terraforming will turn Mars into a second Earth. Although these currently are all fallacies or wishful thinking at most, humans

The colonization of the moon is a step in which must be taken before the colonization of Mars is even feasible. This is due to the fact that the moon would be a cheaper colony that would set the foundation for colonizing a much tougher landmass, like Mars. An advocate of this belief is Nasa’s planetary scientist Chris Mckay who had to say the following on the topic of Moon colonization, “My interest is not the moon. To me the moon is as dull as a ball of concrete, but we're not going to have a research base on Mars until we can learn how to do it on the Moon first. The moon provides a blueprint to Mars.” Without a blueprint, it becomes significantly harder to build a colony and the rate of failure will rise. Skipping a phase which would set the foundation for the entire Mars colony would only cause it to collapse onto

One of the many ideas brought up by the article is to launch reflective heat resistant disks that are 155 miles in diameter, and weigh a grand total of 200,000 tons or 400,000,000 pounds. The discs are meant to be able to reflect the sun’s solar rays toward Mars warming up the planet and releasing greenhouse gases that would form an atmosphere. An interesting idea without a doubt, but would need an abounding amount of resources, money, and time to build and launch. Furthermore, another theory for terraforming is the redirection of an asteroid. They plan to do this by strapping nuclear rockets to an amnesia heavy asteroid and launching into Mars causing the greenhouse gases to rise forming an atmosphere. Once again an interesting idea, but not very feasible for the same reasons as the previous idea. Lacking in realisticness, the theories make it hard to accept terraforming as a way to colonize Mars in the present time or near future. Due to the number of resources, energy, money, and time it will require to achieve even one of the