「经济学人」Terraforming Mars

文章预览

Terraforming Mars Engineered dust could help make Mars habitable Restoring water on Mars may be easier than you think IF YOU WANT to live elsewhere in the solar system, Mars is the least-bad choice. These days, the planet is a frigid, poison-soaked desert. But as the dry river valleys that cross its surface suggest, things were balmy enough in the past to allow liquid water. For decades, scientists and science-fiction authors have toyed with the idea of restoring Mars to that warmer state by “terraforming” it—changing the planet’s climate to make it friendly to Earthlings. Their proposals tend to involve heroic engineering: injecting vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, say, or using nuclear explosives to melt underground ice. A paper published this week in Science Advances offers an easier method. Samaneh Ansari, a graduate student at Northwestern University, in Illinois, and her colleagues reckon that pumping engineered dust into the atmosphere could warm ………………………………