Jim Green, NASA's chief scientist, will say goodbye to the agency after four decades, including 12 years as the director of NASA's planetary science division.
According to the New York Times, Green is going to propose a plan to colonize Mars. Green's plan hinges on a giant magnetic shield between the Red Planet and the Sun, which would bring temperature and pressure levels above the point at which humans could walk on the surface without a space suit.
Green told the newspaper that it was doable. The pressure is going to increase if the stripping is stopped. Mars is going to terraform itself. We want the planet to be involved in this in any way it can. The temperature goes up when the pressure goes up.
That is a strong stance for a top NASA official.
Green says his plan could allow humans to live on Mars for a long time. He has been looking for life on other planets for a long time and has created a scale to measure it.
He says the planetary community probably won't be receptive to his ideas about tinkering with an entire planet. Lucianne Walkowicz argued in Slate that we are likely to turn Mars' surface into an ecological nightmare, given our track record at speeding climate change and strip mining disasters on Earth.
Walkowicz wasn't sure terraforming is physically possible.
Despite terraforming's hold on the popular imagination, it remains solidly in the realm of fiction. Mars doesn't seem to have enough carbon dioxide to warm it in the first place.
Green told the NYT that he wants to make sure scientists are serious about any claim to have found even the smallest traces of life on other planets.
Scientists said they had seen phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. They believed life was one of the major possibilities because they saw it at such a high level. Seven is the number of life found on the CoLD scale. It didn't make it to two. Stop crying wolf.
Green leaves behind a legacy of searching for life, but it is not clear whether his plans for terraforming Mars will ever come to fruition. Some of his ideas may only live in theory on the papers he publishes, and if that is the case, not every scientist would be disappointed at a lack of results.
There are more reasons why humans shouldn't colonize Mars.
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