Terraforming of Mars

I propose that links to random wikipedia articles should be considered below the threshold of "interesting" for the front page of HN. Who's with me?

Sometimes I wish that some of the current Wikipedia article could be sent back in time to the early days of Wikipedia. Contributors and readers from that time would be blown away.

The easiest initial way to live on Mars is not to terraform, but to build huge insulated cities, perhaps by remote-controlled robot years before we first get there. Terraforming could come much later by those who already live there. Earth might need insulated cities in the future, if the air is polluted enough, so perhaps that'd be a premiminary learning exercise in how to build them. Of course, Mars is anywhere from 4 to 20 light-minutes away, so the robots would at least need to be semi-intelligent, so prior experience building colonies on the Moon, only a few light seconds away, would help. And the Moon would be just as hospitable as Mars anyway, if we're building insulated cities. Rebuilding by robot in a radiated nuclear wasteland on Earth might even be a learning exercise for building on the Moon.

As for the low gravity in each place, wouldn't children born there adapt as they grow up, with a bit of medical help of course. Although their parents could move from a higher gravity environment to a lower easily enough, I wouldn't imagine anyone could move from the environment they grew up in to a higher-gravity one, so anyone born on the Moon or Mars would be doomed to live there forever I'd imagine.

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. You can't live there without shielding, end of story.

They mention a lot of options like transporting hydrocarbons from Titan or Ammonia from the outer solar system (as methods for atmosphere formation).

Clearly the best source of CO2 is to export it from Earth. A space railway from Earth to Mars for shipping CO2 would be at least as practical as any of the other options.