Sounds great. But there is one serious drawback, even with the right technology the process would take a very long time. Hundreds or even thousands of years. Possible techniques vary but essentially you warm up a planet's atmosphere using greenhouse gases, tap underground sources of water released by ice melt, engineer suitable plant life to release atmospheric gas and convert CO2 to Oxygen. More vegetation. The atmospheric pressure rises; it becomes breathable to human and animal life. Presto! Off we go and shoot deer, fell timber, clear virgin acres and farm rich productive soil. Straightforward? Not at all. Little ever is.
Once you have created a suitably high pressure atmosphere on Mars with your godlike talents you have to keep releasing gas ad infinitum. Because Mars has a much lower gravity field than Earth. Gas bleeds off too quickly from the atmospheric boundary into space.
And our own planet has a naturally evolved biosphere. It is rather robust. But we have managed to put even that at risk; whether through species die-off, deforestation, weapons of mass destruction, or the vast release of greenhouse gases. Even a fully Terra-formed Mars, a thousand years or so in the future, would have an artificially created biosphere far more fragile than that of Earth. How could we protect that from our own depredations? Imagine if we had built-up a population of hundreds of millions on a Terra-formed Mars. What would we do to avert a self-induced climate catastrophe on Mars then?
And remember that colonisation of Mars will be a twenty first century challenge. The next great step for the 22nd or 23rd centuries may be travelling to other star systems, where habitable but uninhabited planets may be expected to exist in numbers and where colonisation may be attempted without the need for Terra-forming. Mars is a different type of adventure. The creation of a challenging frontier for the human spirit when it badly needs one. The wresting of a living from the most marginal of environments. A place for stout hearts and strong bodies; for brave minds and more than a trace of steel. It may come none too soon. Before we even start to settle Mars we are likely to be finding humanity splitting more and more into two distinct sub-cultures. Homo Virtualis and Homo Realis, if you like. The former finding its challenges in a world of whizzing electrons and silicon pathways; and the latter seeking real challenge in a very real and dangerous world.. Homo Virtualis will have been to Mars. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, in his shadow world, long before Homo Realis has established a firm foothold on the Red Planet. Virtualis will be trundling along in the Matrix looking for the next big thing (and good luck to him). In the meantime, things in the real world will be cooking withou any need to Terra-form Mars.
Forget also about arguments that Mars could be a refuge for humanity in the face of planetary catastrophe. It might preserve some millions of people and a good sample of our gene pool, but even if you could build a fleet of ships capable of carrying 10,000 humans apiece, you would need 700,000 (!) such ships to carry the population of Earth to Mars. Space Arks would be just that, Noah-like specimen containers, not rescue ships.
So Terra-forming is not necessary. It is a side track. The stars will beckon us first. Meantime the challenge is to maintain the human spirit with a real frontier. And I for one do not want to see humanity riding out into interplanetary space just to create clones of the Earth. There is magnificence out there a plenty already. We have treaties in place protecting the hostile but irreplaceable virgin environment of the Antarctic. There may not even be primitive life today on Mars but should we not preserve at least the cold beauties of its landscapes and vistas? Doesn't a planet, a whole separate world, deserve better of us than transformation into something else entirely?
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