BY OUR GLOBAL WARMING WRITERS

MARS NEEDS CARBON DIOXIDE to have a livable atmosphere. Earth needs to get rid of its excess carbon dioxide to prevent runaway global warming. One scientist says that the meeting of these two needs is a once in a millennium opportunity. Take Earth’s excess Carbon Dioxide and dump it on Mars. Make Mars habitable; keep Earth habitable. Win. Win.

“If we are to terraform Mars we are going to need an awful lot of carbon dioxide,” says Dr Luca Meningitys a specialist in planetary formation at the University of Strange New Worlds in Havana, Cuba. “We are told that the world is currently suffering from a huge increase in carbon dioxide which threatens to boil us all out of existence. What if we could capture all the surplus carbon dioxide from Earth and take it to Mars? We could make a perfectly habitable atmosphere on Mars, then melt the ice caps and hey presto, Mars is livable for humans. Bring on the colonists. It would help with surplus population, too. People who want a better life, a different life, or just an affordable house, could be incentivized to emigrate to Mars. All we need is the will and the money. Everything else will follow.”

Cosmologist Axel Botox has reservations. “It’s not an impossible task. But the implications of sending folks to live on Mars have to be understood. After a couple of generations the people there would not be able to come back here. Sure they could lift huge weights on Mars but their bodies would be shaped by the low gravity and the lack of any magnetic field to protect from deadly solar rays. Who wants to spend their lives underground, growing into to super-tall string-like creatures perhaps malformed by radiation? They might just prefer to live with global warming on earth.”