This Future Laser Technology Could Be The Key To Terraforming Mars – SlashGear

Turning a dead space rock into a comfortable summer home for humanity isn’t like flipping a house, as explained in a video published by Kurzgesagt. Mars has no surface water to support life; the thin atmosphere hardly has any oxygen; the surface doesn’t contain the nutrients needed to grow plants. As it turns out, though, many of these problems can be remedied by melting the planet’s surface to release needed chemicals trapped in rocks. That first step outlined above would melt Mars’ entire surface down to the depth of a typical two-story house, and it would get us all the oxygen we’d need.

This would cause some wacky weather for a while, like steaming ice caps and iron snow. Oh, and don’t forget the blindingly bright lava flows. Even though it would release massive amounts of oxygen, the atmosphere itself would be dangerously flammable and still thinner than the air atop Mount Everest. Even so, it’s a good start.

All that would be left to do is import three quadrillion tons of nitrogen, pulverize the newly-cooled volcanic rock surface into powder, introduce a balanced and self-sustaining food web from bacteria and algae up through plants and animals (which has been a struggle here at home), and then somehow deflect the solar and cosmic radiation because — oh yeah — Mars doesn’t have Earth’s protective magnetic field. You can see all the details for yourself in the wonderful video above. It’s really as simple as that, so we’re not sure what the skepticism’s about, Neil deGrasse Tyson.