I know it'll be a long ways off before we can efficiently get spacecraft / astronauts to Mars, but I heard it would only take about 100 years (Not including getting everything there) to terraform the planet. Basically, creating as many power plants as we can and causing global warming. Even if it couldnt sustain life after all that, what better place to start deep-space exploration when you're already purposefully churning out as much energy as you can? Not to mention as we advance in technology, we need a place to field test it. I dont want some anti-matter weapons or something tried out on our own soil, some weather control device, or WTF ever crazy shit they're coming up with that could have negative results on a worldwide scale.

I think we should seed space with as much life as we can. Turning a basically dieing planet into a second Earth, where new & different organisms could evolve couldn't be such a bad thing, despite all the costs. We've spent money on stupider things in the long run (Maybe not that much $$, but still, stupid shit)

What the plans for developing an EM field?

IDK if there's any development on that

you should read the "red mars" series. very interesting novel about the colonization of mars. some great ideas like:

black dust on the ice caps/permafrost to melt it, creating water and atmosphere.
crashing meteors into the red planet (or just bringing them through atmosphere) to create heat and add to atmosphere.
water-ice asteroid collision adding water and heat.

one of the main problems is that mars core is thought to be cool. no plate techtonics and no magnetosphere -this allows solar wind to boil the atmosphere right off the planet. it gets hotter and lighter and eventually blows out into space. so we could terraform it, then watch the whole thing go up in smoke.

OFC

I don't think we should but that's of course just me. I have my reasons, but I do not want to go into all of the specs of it.

I think people can get there faster if the governments didn't hold onto so much "special" technology. and yes I am a conspiracy theorist

We're talking about Spore here, right?

it's probably worth it in the long run. the survival of the human race depends on expanding into and colonizing space, granted we don't kill ourselves off beforehand. however, the technology required to create such a massive planet heater that will alter mars' atmosphere will take a long time to develop, let alone build in space or even on mars itself. not to mention the urgency to terraform a planet like mars just isn't there yet.

i am not a specialist into this subject , but iirc the mass of the mars is far below the mass of the earth , and as a result of this an athmosphere would slowly *leave* the planet ( gravity is to low to hold it back ). furthermore mars is missing a strong magnet-field - protecting it from the solar-wind . so u would have to live IN the planet to be safe from solar radiation and constantly generate oxygen to replace the losses. and i am sure we all wont see a real colonization of our neighbour