After Leaving NASA, This Scientist Has Ambitions To Make Mars A Habitable Planet

Life on the barren and arid Planet Mars will be transformed into habitable. (photo: Doc. NASA)

JAKARTA - Towards the end of last year, NASA scientist Jim Green has declared his separation from the space agency. Green left because he had big plans for Mars.

Green has been on the Mars project for more than four decades. He has served 12 years as director of NASA's planetary science division and the last three years as its chief scientist.

The news of Green's release was accompanied by his plan to engineer Mars into a habitable planet, aka Teraformasi. The plan, published in November, relies on warming and thickening the Martian atmosphere using a giant magnetic shield between the Red Planet and the Sun.

This would bring temperature and pressure levels above the point where humans could walk on surfaces without space, and without special clothing.

"It can be done. Stop stripping, and the pressure will increase. Mars will start terraforming itself. That's what we want. The planet is participating in this in one way or another. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up", Green said recently to the NYTimes.

Launching Futurism, Tuesday, January 4, the Green concept could also allow humans to start growing plants on Mars and lead a long-term life away from Earth. He was obsessed with finding life on other planets for years and created the life detection belief scale, or COLD.

One obstacle, however, is the planetary community, which he says might not accept his idea of fiddling with the entire planet.

Back in 2018, astronomer Adler Planetarium and co-founder of the advocacy group Just Space Alliance, Lucianne Walkowicz, argued at Slate that humans are likely to turn the Martian surface into an ecological nightmare, given humanity's track record of accelerating climate change and mining for disasters on Earth.

In addition, Walkowicz isn't even sure that terraforming is possible. "Although terraforming holds fast to the popular imagination, it remains solid in the realm of fiction", says Walkowicz.

"For one thing, Mars appears to lack the carbon dioxide reserves needed to pump up its atmosphere and warm it."

But Green is sticking with his plan to focus on finding life on other planets. Green left a legacy filled with a voracious search for life, but it's unclear if his plans to transform Mars will actually come to fruition.

Because when he leaves a well-staffed and well-funded space agency like NASA, some of his ideas may only live on in theory in the papers he publishes.