#(a name I detest regardless of my opinion on climate change)

[just-a-cruel-white-man]

Well, successfully doing something is often a lot harder than fucking it up. Climbing a cliff is a lot harder than messing up and falling off a cliff. Balancing a pen upright is a lot harder than making said pen fall over.

The earth is semi-stable, if you let it be it'll probably keep harboring life for a while, but fuck it up enough and it's gonna go back to being any random ol' planet. The climate change debate (at its most extreme) is essentially about what the tipping point is and whether we can or have reached it.

So yeah it may be much easier to de-terraform a planet than to terraform it.

While terraforming Mars is theoretically possible, it is not within mankinds current capabilities and is unlikely to be within those capabilities anytime soon. It would be more practical to construct space stations as human habitats than try to alter a planet with less gravity than earth, no magnetic field, barely any atmosphere, and toxic dust dispersed throughout its soil.

Venus at least has the gravity required, and bands in the upper atmosphere with earth-like temperatures and pressure. As an industrial hub, the Mercurial north pole has water ice on the surface and would make an ideal location for launching a dyson swarm. I just don't get the appeal of mars...

Well Venus has so much gravity it squashed flat all the spacecraft the Soviets sent there, and all the images I've seen of its surface make it look like the least-inhabitable furnace in the known universe, a real-life Hades.

I very much applaud the drive to expand human life through the universe, but it does seem to me pretty much impossible to survive on Mars right now, and decades/centuries(?) into the future. I keep thinking we should start small and make some 5-mile-deep undersea cities for a few decades first, where people can at least be rescued when things go wrong.