Mars: A Delicious, Fun-sized Portion of the Solar Candy Bar Not Everyone Is Chewing

The Mars Society's (MS) idea of inhabiting the red planet is the new Manifest Destiny, with a twist. Instead of expanding upon their territory, the MS wants to leave Earth all together. This form of interplanetary barhopping is an example of nothing more than trashing one planet and ditching it for another, which will probably get trashed, too.

The founder of the MS, Robert Zubrin, has devised a five-step (misstated in the article) plan to make Mars inhabitable--within a mere millennium:

1. "Terraforming" or creating a palette for growth on the planet through warming the planet by means of either/or:
(a) Setting up large mirrors to reflect the sun's rays upon Mars
(b) Directing an asteroid in a collision course with the planet
(c) Inducing global warming by erecting chemical-emitting plants on Mars

2. Releasing CO2 from within the planet to accelerate the warming process

3. Establishing facilities that would grow vegetation

4. Reaping the vegetation

5. Continuing the farming cycle for 1,000 years

At Popsci.com, Zubrin makes a horrible comparison between himself and Christopher Columbus. Zubrin said many were skeptical of Columbus and his idea of a journey across the Atlantic, just like scientists now are not buying Durbin’s proposal of transitioning Mars from a barren wasteland to a livable planet within 1,000 years.

The problem with this comparison is that Columbus' voyage did not factually bring about much skepticism. It had been long discovered that Earth was a round planet by the time Columbus ventured. Even then, the places he went had already been discovered with fairly large populations living on that land.

Maybe this gross misrepresentation of historical evidence should send a sign to people everywhere.



Information from this post was obtained from Will Snyder's "Hijacking the Red Planet" and the Wikipedia article on Christopher Columbus.