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The article makes no mention of the need for a magnetosphere to protect the new atmosphere from being blown away by the solar wind.

Without some sort of protection - any terraforming activity will be wasted within just a few hundred years.

Much better would to look for a rocky planet with a stable existing atmosphere which needs cleaning up - such as Venus.

If Mars is a "dead" planet, and we'll only find out if we go there and search for life, then why not terraform.

However, if there is any sign of life, no matter how small, do we then have the right to destroy what then might be the only known life beyond our own planet?

Hi All

Mars could be in a meta-stable state ready to be tipped towards a new equilibrium that's more clement - that was the basis of James Lovelock's "The Greening of Mars" (1984).

There's an unknown amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the porosities of the martian regolith - perhaps a large consolidated reservoir (liquid CO2 lake under pressure?) could be catastrophically released via an impact or a nuke? If so Mars would warm up practically overnight and then, then we'd have to work on stopping readsorption.

Ian, solar wind erosion of atmosphere at the present is negligible and is likely to stay that way until the Sun leaves the Main Sequence. It only eroded Mars' putative early atmosphere because the wind was stronger in the Sun's youth. I agree with you that Venus might be a better target, but it does have a few issues of its own.

Steve, Mars and Earth exchange rocks all the time and may have cross-contaminated each other right from the very origin of Life. I personally think we're as likely to be descended from Martian microbes as we are to be native born. Or perhaps both worlds (and Titan?) were seeded by Venus before its oceans blew away. I find it suspicious that the first oxygen-producing microbes appeared on Earth at the same time Venus' early oceans are believed to have become a runaway greenhouse.

Hi,

Mars can't be terraformed.
http://www.geocities.com/alt_cosmos/index.html

Michael