Image credit: SpaceX
Elon Musk, founder of private space company SpaceX, recently explained to CNNMoney that a long-term goal of SpaceX is to create a “self-sustaining civilization on Mars.”
In August 2012, Musk told ABC News that he hopes to be ready to send humans to Mars in 2025. He has stated many times that he wants to be a passenger on his company’s first flight to the red planet. And in a March 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, he explained that he wants “to die on Mars, just not on impact.”
How to make Mars more habitable:
Drop Phobos, Deimos, Vesta and Ceres onto Mars to increase mass and water content. Then find an asteroid of the best appropriate material and pulverize it into dust at the Mars Lagrange point opposite the Sun, utilizing the reflectivity of the created dust cloud to increase incident visible light and IR on the surface of Mars to warm it up.
This steps are not beyond our technology, although perhaps beyond our budgets.