WRONG .... Mars can be terraformed fairly quickly.
Define quickly.
Not unless they find large amounts of water there. It would be difficult to stretch a bucket brigade from here to there.
Just wait until environmentalists block it with endless lawsuits.
"WRONG .... Mars can be terraformed fairly quickly."
In the movies, sure. B Grade of course.
"WRONG .... Mars can be terraformed fairly quickly."
Sure it can...then the solar wind will blow the new multi-trillion dollar atmoshpere out into deep space along with the promised H2O swamp land these terraformers are proposing.
The one little fact that intellectually dishonest terraformers of Mars are failing to provide is that the core of Mars is solid. What protects the earth from evaporation has been the protective magnetic field shielding us from solar winds.
In fact, at the risk of asounding unpatriotic, most of this astronaut stuff strikes me as suspicious science and engineering. The shuttle should be on a used car lot somewhere, while we get into the heavy duty manned flights from our Moon bases to Mars to set up colonies.
Where do I sign up!
Actually, you're wrong. We THINK we can terraform Mars fairly quickly.
On the other hand, we've never terraformed ANY planet to date.
And, of course, we need the technology and infrastructure to be ABLE to attempt the Terraforming of Mars.
The process appears to be fairly straightforward, but as in any major engineering process, the bugaboos are in the details. . . . and we don't HAVE the details yet.
50 years from now, that will likely change. . .
We won't find any place as nice as earth. Period. We might construct a place as nice, and we might do this all we want both inside the solar system and around other stars.
If terraforming is so easy, why can't we just terraform earth to climatological perfection? No need to have Chicken Little and Algore to warn us of impending disaster!