I said this on twitter but you genuinely do not need any understanding of engineering or space technology to know that we will never terraform mars. Most biologists can tell you why but even a layman who understands anything about nature can tell you there is no amount of money or technology that will ever recreate a sustainable ecosystem on a giant ball of toxic irradiated sand. For most of the time that life existed on EARTH you would have immediately died from the difference in atmospheric composition.
The only reason we even have an oxygen-based atmosphere is that one day one single bacterium evolved into the first photosynthesizing cyanobacterium and its spread caused the extinction of an entire methane-based global ecosystem.
It took a billion years of evolutionary and geological events to create the world we live in and at absolutely any single second it all could have suddenly veered off down a different path. 1% of the money and effort it would take to inhabit mars could make our own entire planet a better place first.
