Reshaping a planet takes a very long time - tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands - and most people don't want to wait that long. So if we want to find a way to occupy Mars, let's try a different tack. Leave the planet as it is, but change our own human bodies so that we can live on it. The changes will have to be really drastic - but not, I think, impossible. And we may have to wait only 100 years instead of 100,000. Here's what we'll need:
Electronic eyes: Mars is cold, averaging 10 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Human eyes, being largely water, would freeze. There's only starlight at night, so make them photomultipliers, and sensitive to infrared.
Artificial lungs: We won't be able to inhale deeply enough to fill our lungs with Martian air; it wouldn't do any good anyway - there's almost no oxygen, but plenty of carbon dioxide, raw material for a catalyst-cracking oxygen generator.
Plastic skin: To keep out the dangerous solar radiation and hold in our vitals in the Martian near-vacuum, it would have to be as tough as Naugahyde. Array it with heat and pressure sensors connected directly to what's left of our nervous system so that we'll know whether a rock, say, has fallen and crushed our ankle.
Bat wings: but not for flying. These would function as solar panels and power all that gear. If the sun doesn't supply enough energy, then we could put a nuclear power plant overhead in a Mars-stationary orbit and beam down all the electrical energy we could ever want, in the form of microwaves.
Frederik Pohl is the author of Man Plus and, most recently, The Boy Who Would Live Forever.
