What is Terraforming?
Terraforming is a concept that scientists have envisioned that could bring dead worlds to life, so that people might more easily live on them. Terraforming literally means to “make Earth-like”. The idea is to change the environment of another planet to make it suitable for human habitation using various technological techniques. Candidates for Terraforming Four worlds are at about the right size and mass to be candidates for terraforming. These worlds are Venus, Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), and Titan (a moon of Saturn.) But Europa and Titan are too far from the sun and are therefore too cold. Venus is too close to the sun and has an incredibly thick atmosphere, and is therefore too hot, with an average temperature of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. That leaves Mars.
Well, terraforming a world means transforming it into a living, habitable planet, with a breathable atmosphere and a bearable temperature. By altering conditions on Mars, we could kill off any ‘native’ life there which is the major concern. However, the difficulty of killing all the life on Mars is close to impossible. Anything we can do to Mars only scratches the surface we do not alter the rock down to dozens of kilometres below. We cannot do that, and thus, we cannot kill the life, which is most probably in the form of microbes, since if there are microbes, they will be buried many kilometres below the surface. This, however, is not a perfect scenario since preferably we wouldn’t want to kill any microbes at all.
The procedure of changing the Martian atmosphere (or any other terrestrial atmosphere) to create a more habitable living environment is called terraforming. How practical is it? Mars is the second closest planet to us with Venus as the closest. Despite it being a frigid and dry planet, it holds all of the elements that are needed for life to flourish, including: Water, found at the polar ice caps Carbon and oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide Nitrogen There are advantageous similarities between the atmosphere of Mars and the atmosphere of Earth billions of years ago. During earths formation there was no oxygen and it was thus unlivable. The atmosphere was exclusively carbon dioxide and nitrogen, until bacteria, that utilized photosynthesis, developed on Earth which allowed sufficient oxygen to spur the development of animals. Likewise, the thin Mars atmosphere today is almost solely composed of carbon dioxide. Here is the current composition of Mars’ atmosphere: 95.3% carbon dioxide 2
