The Right Way to Terraform
We humans like to think big. And so we’re enthralled by the idea of terraforming other planets, notably Mars. We love the idea of remaking a hostile, barren planet into a comfortable, beautiful new world, capable of supporting and sustaining us with plentiful food and other necessities. And if we have to do it by bombarding the poles with thousands of nuclear bombs, hey, nobody said it would be easy, right?
This, of course, is not going to happen soon, or probably ever, on Mars, Venus, or any other planet. The only planetary-scale tinkering we’ve managed so far has resulted in the release of enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into our own atmosphere, messing up the home on which we originated and evolved. Proposals to “geoengineer” our way out of this fiasco, with vast, risky, and international efforts, will most likely come to nothing.
Hopefully, we won’t need them. Over the last decade or so, movements have sprung up and gained momentum naturally, driven by market forces, and they hold tremendous promise for mitigating climate change on Earth and maybe even for colonizing Mars someday. Three that I’m particularly excited about are indoor farming, the replacement of meat, and the construction of self-contained microclimates.
