That being said: Yes. Oh yes. Fuck yes. All my yesses.
If we can't terraform Earth's deserts, do we really stand a chance with Mars?
I might be mistaken in my analysis. Still, the only way a colony might survive seems to be by sending tremendous amounts of resources to Mars yearly. They can never hope to be self-sustaining until either astronomically large amounts of time or astronomically large amounts of energy are spent.
Mars has less of a molten core, and a very weak magnetosphere. Therefore outdoor terraforming seems unlikely. We may have to walk around on Mars inside shielded colonies only, along with whatever other life we bring: plants, animals, everything.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Earth-have-an-active-core-whi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031891439...
Water seems to be a fairly decent shield, so it's tempting to imagine a human-made aquatic ecosystem. Fish would probably survive without any extra shielding besides water, so that's one natural resource we could start generating, assuming we could transport massive quantities of water to Mars. Unfortunately, the water would just evaporate or freeze, so we'd need shielding for that too.
I agree though that mars colonies would be underground for a long, long time.
This article covers some problems with terraforming Mars: http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/trouble_with_terraf...
On the other hand, sending life to Mars, due to that radiation, would make it evolve much faster, right? Perhaps we can start terraforming it and study the evolutions of plants and animals there to gain insight in how to overcome our frailties.
> Using human cultured cells, we demonstrate that a tardigrade-unique DNA-associating protein suppresses X-ray-induced DNA damage by ~40% and improves radiotolerance. These findings indicate the relevance of tardigrade-unique proteins to tolerability and tardigrades could be a bountiful source of new protection genes and mechanisms.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160920/ncomms12808/full/nc...
So maybe we end up with huge domes made of tanks with 20' of water in them.
Also, since Mars has CO2, I'm guessing once a dome is up, we simply pressurize it with the surrounding atmosphere? Once pressurized we could use O2 tanks and cannulas, or add plants?
I fear that there is going to be a huge political debate first -- a lot of folks are going to say that man isn't worthy/able/competent/etc to colonize another planet.
The bottleneck in evolution isn't mutations but selection events (~= number of organisms).
It's not that we couldn't, it's that we don't care to - partly because the reward isn't there, and partly because there are opposing interests. Humans absolutely have had (and are having) large-scale impact on the Earth's climate, and that's while mostly trying not to.
Building a house takes months, but in a day, it can be burnt. Fighting entropy 101.
To be fair, it can be done and it is slowly being done in some countries. It's still very difficult and expensive, though. That being said, indeed doing it on mars would be orders of magnitude more difficult.
That might be true, but if we could divert even a small part of the global arms industry to something as constructive as colonizing a new world then I suspect we might help things here as well as achieving something wonderful.
Edit: "Oh yes. Fuck yes. All my yesses"
Can I second this. I remember reading Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" and getting quite enthusiastic about actually being a Martian colonist :-)
The second best time is today.
Go Elon!