Physicist Lowell Wood (formerly at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and long-time Visiting Fellow of Stanford University’s right-wing think tank, the Hoover Institution) launched a plan to terraform Mars at the Aspen Institute‘s Flight School on June 20-22, 2007.

“I suggest that the near-term outlook is that Mars will be terraformed,” Wood said, and seriously underway by the middle of this century and essentially complete by the end of the 21^st century.
Wood defined terraforming as “the purposeful alteration of the physical environment to increase its habitability for humans.” He noted that we homo sapiens are a terraforming species, pointing to our own planet’s alteration over time.

While experimenting with the planetary system might be considered an option to be tried out on far away planets rather than our own, terraforming has been explored also as a solution to some of our own planet’s challenges. A while ago, Wood – both revered and feared for his outside-the-box thinking and radical ideas – suggested to create a global thermostat by spraying sulfate particles into the stratosphere as a countermeasure to global warming (an idea also uttered by Nobel Prize Winner Paul Crutzen)

Via Space.com, see also Jamais’ OpenTheFuture

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