Information continued (2)

Artist's conception of a Martian landscape after the planet has been warmed to Earth-like temperatures. A mobile soil-processing unit (in foreground) generates greenhouse gases that trap solar energy and trigger the creation of a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. Plants imported from Earth could grow on the surface, but humans could not breathe the air and would need to carry oxygen tanks.(picture and caption from Scientific America)

Now you are probably going to ask how are we going to do this? Well, today Mars is a cold and dry world with very little atmosphere. However, these can be fixed. One way is by somehow giving Mars a thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere. This then would increase the pressure 1 to 2 times as much as air on Earth's sea level. By doing this, it would melt the ice on Mars.

Then just by adding little bits of certain chemicals and gases, (like nitrogen) plants could grow and eventually there would be an ozone layer created.

This would be able to support plant life and microbial life on Mars. However, animals would not by able to due to the lack of oxygen. Even though humans would still need to bring oxygen, the new atmosphere would create a comfortable enough temperature and the pressure would be about right. That would be the end of space suits on Mars. Also, we could be able to have farms for food.

However, we would need to terraform Mars for it to be able to have animals and humans. This would be much harder though. We would have a lot of materials. If Mars does not have those already, bringing them from Earth would be impractical (It would take FOREVER). Just for nitrogen, it would need over a million billion tons to produce an atmosphere on Mars.
Here is a chart from Scientific America showing the "ingredients" for life on Mars.

What if Mars already contains those materials? Then the first thing is to warm the planet. Since this would take so much more energy than any human source, we would have to somehow use the sun. (Energy from the sun in 30 minutes would be more than the explosion of all the nukes in US and Russia.) Some say to put black soil or dust on the ice caps so they would absorb more sunlight and melt. Others say to use mirrors. However, both would require a lot of materials. For example, the mirror would have to be the size of Texas to increase the sunlight by just 2%.

A better way would be to use one of Earth's problems, the green house effect, as a solution to Mars's problem. We would just pump certain gases into Mars's atmosphere. This would heat up Mars just like they create global warming on Earth.

Again though we cannot ship so much gase between the planets. They would have to produce it on Mars with hundreds of car-sized, solar powered, factories.

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