According to Carl Sagan in his famous book Cosmos, about 1200 Saturn V payloads of dark material could be used to dust the martian polar caps and bring about their melting. How about ICBMs built on Mars at human colonies that detonate packages of dark volcanic soil abundant on Mars, or mass drivers to launch the cannon projectile like packages or even aircraft to make drops of dark heat absorbing material over the polar ice caps? Combine this with CFC factories and solar reflectors at Mars-Sun L4 and L5 and certainly, Mars could be terraformed. Waste heat from human activity and methane emmissions from human composting could contribute to the martian run-away greenhouse effect. Those day side reflectors at L4 and L5 would be the percursors of interplanetary beamrider stations.
Since blue-green algae can double their mass four times a day, it is my personal beleif that Mars could be covered with bacterial life that converts the CO2 to an oxygen atmosphere in just a few years after liquid water and a CO2 atmosphere was formed by melting the polar caps and warming the planet enough to melt permafrost also. |
