Moving to Mars!

Yesterday for April Fools Day, one of Google’s jokes was a supposed project with Virgin to create the first human colony on Mars by 2014. Ha ha, great joke, guys!

And then, as if by design, the Science Channel aired a show about Mars. I was flipping through to catch American Idol but got caught up in this show.

Apparently, making Mars habitable is very much within our reach — all it takes are some greenhouse gases (our specialty!) to warm it up and melt the frozen subterranean oceans. Then, with abundant water and CO2, and all the elements necessary for life already in the soil, plants will be able to grow and generate oxygen for humans.

All this will take thousands of years with our current technology, but some of the experts were very confident that the next couple of centuries would bring technologies we’ve never even dreamed of, to speed this all up.

So maybe it might not be such a joke after all?

And what makes me super excited is the possibility that, once liquid water is restored to Mars, dormant Martian life-forms just might come back to life.

To quote Legally Blonde: The Musical, “Omigod you guys!”

Tags: Mars, Science Channel, Virgle, space colonization