Terraforming Mars: A Realistic Roadmap to a Greener Red Planet

A new arXiv paper outlines a phased, testable plan to terraform Mars—starting with atmospheric warming and melting frozen reservoirs, then seeding engineered microbes to build Earth-like ecosystems—arguing advances in climate modeling, biotech, and cheap launches make it plausible, while underscoring ethical and scientific uncertainties about reversibility and potential microbial life.