“Is It Foolishness to Dream of Terraforming Mars?”

“Is It Foolishness to Dream of Terraforming Mars?” 2017-07-19T16:35:38-06:00

 

A NASA photo of the Martian surface
On the surface of Mars    (NASA public domain photograph.)

 

Some years ago, a Latter-day Saint scientist with whom I was speaking ventured the passing hypothesis that what we have in the various scriptural and other creation accounts of the Mormon tradition might well be records of a process of terraforming, of making a suitable candidate planet actually adequate to sustaining human life.

 

It’s obviously not my field, and I haven’t given it a great deal of sustained thought.  But there is, in the back of my mind, an interest in the idea of terraforming that simply hasn’t gone away.

 

More recently, perhaps two years back, another Latter-day Saint scientist (not in any of the fields directly relevant to terraforming, I should point out) responded to my casual mention of the topic in conversation that the concept of terraforming had been discredited.  Since I don’t follow these the relevant scientific fields all that closely, I supposed that he might be right — although I plainly hadn’t received any such memo myself.

 

Anyway, I found this short piece of interest in that light:

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/07/15/ask-ethan-is-it-foolishness-to-dream-of-terraforming-mars/#5a83a73148c6

 

It seems that some, at least, still consider the theoretical possibility of terraforming viable and worth discussing.

 

And if we humans can think about it, what about God (or the Gods)?

 

Posted from Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii*

 

*  Which, in itself, could be considered a quite limited example of terraforming.

 

 


Browse Our Archives