Turn left at the big red planet

I wanna live on Mars! All the books I have read said it could be done. Sure, they were all science fiction books, but they were still books.

I don’t think we can terraform Mars, if terraforming is, as it was originally defined, making Mars suitable for human beings. But what we could do is make Mars suitable for life.

Human beings are a particular subset of life that require particular conditions. And it turns out oxygen in particular is very hard to make on Mars. That is, I think, beyond our technological horizons – it’s a long time in the future.

Okay, sure we don’t have rocketpacks yet, but that’s just impractical. People can barely drive cars, and you want them to fly? But given the right imputous, we’ll figure out how to make Mars suitable for humans soon enough. Maybe to save us from impending global disaster.