Turning the Red Planet green? It's time to take terraforming Mars seriously, scientists say

The concept of terraforming Mars — transforming the planet's climate to support life as we know it — has long belonged to the realm of science fiction. But a new study argues that it's time to take the idea seriously.

"Thirty years ago, terraforming Mars wasn't just hard — it was impossible," said Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs and lead author of the new paper. "But new technology like [SpaceX's] Starship and synthetic biology have now made it a real possibility."

The paper debates the complex ethical questions that must be considered if we're to terraform Mars and lays the blueprint for a potential path forward.

"Advocates argue that more life is better than less, and terraforming Mars could mark humanity's first act of planetary stewardship with a net positive environmental impact," said DeBenedictis.

Why terraform Mars?

Put succinctly, "living planets are better than dead ones," said study co-author Edwin Kite, an associate professor at the University of Chicago. "We now know that Mars was habitable in the past, from data returned by the Mars rovers, so greening Mars could be viewed as the ultimate environmental restoration challenge."

Though full terraforming may take centuries, if not millennia, the long-term goal would be a Mars with stable liquid water, breathable oxygen and a thriving ecosystem. In the short term, this might mean only small patches of microbial life; in the distant future, there could perhaps be human cities on the planet.

And if we reach the scale of cities, perhaps that's a stepping stone to even more significant exploration for our species. "As we move out into the galaxy, we will need base camps, and a base camp on the scale of the galaxy is a habitable planet," said Kite.

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For co-author Robin Wordsworth, a professor of environmental and planetary science at Harvard, the argument for terraforming Mars goes beyond human colonization to the propagation of life in general.

"I see humanity as part of the biosphere, not separate from it," he said. "Life is precious — we know of nowhere else in the universe where it exists — and we have a duty to conserve it on Earth, but also to consider how we could begin to propagate it to other worlds."

What about Earth?

It's not all about looking beyond the bounds of Earth; terraforming Mars could also help us solve climate and sustainability challenges at home, advocates say.

Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a co-author on the paper, sees Mars as a prime testbed for planetary engineering.

"If we want to learn how to modify our environment here on Earth, to keep it in a configuration that suits us and other life forms, maybe it would be better to experiment on Mars and say, 'Look, does this work?'" she said. "I personally would like to be a little more conservative with our home planet. This is the only place we can live."

There are technological lessons to be learned, too.

"Concretely, developing and adopting green technology on Earth often falters because it must compete with dirtier alternatives that benefit from decades of infrastructure investment and entrenched interests," said DeBenedictis. "Mars is a unique target market because it has no oil, no existing infrastructure and no status quo. For this reason, developing green technologies for space is a powerful strategy for maturing it for use on Earth."

Why not terraform Mars?

But we should take a few lessons from "Jurassic Park" when thinking about terraforming, some scientists say: Before asking, "Could we?" we need to ask, "Should we?"

"If we decide to terraform Mars, then we will really change it in ways that may or may not be reversible," said Lanza. "Mars is its own planet and has its own history. When we terraform, then we effectively don't have the opportunity to study that anymore, and we may lose knowledge about how planets form and evolve."

Most dramatically, we may destroy potential evidence of ancient Martian life, if such evidence exists.

"If we modify the environment on Mars, we're going to change the chemistry of the surface and of the subsurface, eventually," said Lanza, pointing out that such actions might erase any traces of life on Mars. "I can't say for certain. It's very complicated, but it's a risk."

How to terraform Mars

Terraforming Mars would require massive changes, namely the warming of the planet to support both oxygen-producing microbes and liquid water. While all the technologies to terraform Mars are not yet available, the authors of the paper propose three phases of development.

First, scientists would use abiotic climate engineering techniques — such as deploying reflective solar sails, dispersing nanoparticles, or laying aerogel tiles — to warm the surface by at least 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), enough to melt subsurface ice and release trapped carbon dioxide. This warming would thicken the Martian atmosphere and potentially support the presence of stable liquid water.

The second phase would introduce extremophile microbes — likely anaerobic and genetically engineered ones — capable of surviving in Mars' harsh conditions and kickstarting ecological succession. These organisms would begin producing oxygen and organic matter, slowly altering planetary chemistry.

The third and longest phase would focus on building a complex biosphere, increasing atmospheric pressure and oxygen content to eventually support more advanced plant life, and, in the very long term, potentially allow humans to breathe unassisted.

Next steps

The study's authors agree: If we're to have any chance of terraforming Mars, we must move forward on multiple fronts simultaneously.

"Answering the question of when and how to start making other worlds habitable requires a clear understanding of the costs and benefits, which can only be adequately assessed based on a combination of theory and experiments, with input from diverse fields including physics, chemistry, materials science and biology," said Kite.

Right now, we need to continue to study Mars. Lanza advocates for the Mars Sample Return mission, a NASA-European Space Agency campaign to bring home material collected on the Red Planet by the Perseverance rover.

"The samples are incredibly well documented and analyzed to the best of our ability on Mars," she said. "Now we need to bring those back, because that's going to help us answer some of these fundamental questions. What is Mars made out of? Are there traces of life?"

And, as we continue to visit the Red Planet, we can put terraforming concepts into practice.

"Upcoming Mars surface missions in 2028 or 2031 should include small-scale experiments to de-risk terraforming strategies, such as warming localized regions," said DeBenedictis.

Then, of course, we need to continue to innovate new technologies that will allow us to terraform Mars in the future.

All this is to say, while fully terraforming Mars might take generations, the decisions start now.

"This is how we get from the imagination and the concept to some reality that has totally changed our world," said Lanza. "We should really keep doing science — it's transformational."

The new study was published May 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This article was originally published on Space.com.