Project Lowell

Project Lowell was the terraforming project of Mars.

History

The Terran Alliance set about taming Mars in the late twenty-first century. After years of study and research, this effort culminated in Project Lowell, which began in 2110 and continued despite the concurrent success of the Deimos Project and access to extrasolar habitable planets.

Project Lowell was in many ways a brute force, and massive ignorance, terraforming scheme that crafted a habitable environment by throwing raw comets at Mars, releasing potent greenhouse gases like chlorofluorocarbons, spreading aggressive engineered terraforming microbes and plants like the Arctic Blue Moss, and dealing with the problems of this "from the hip" terraforming later.

However, Lowell's methods had two advantages: they were fast, delivering an atmosphere that could be breathed unassisted in less than a century (officially 2201, when the average planetary temperature also rose above freezing), and they established a self-sustaining ecosystem that was far more enduring than the worlds (like Mars' sister Venus) that depended on technological environmental stabilization, like Storm Inhibitors, oxygen factories, atmospheric processors, and seismic suppressor stations.

Project Lowell filled much of Mars' low lying northern hemisphere with cometary water delivered simply by steering and slamming comets into Mars. However, the bulk delivery of water by cometary impact could not be repeated after Project Lowell was declared a success in 2205 and humans began settling the world. (That settlement was driven by mining companies, because by 2200 any Terran seeking a planet to colonize would not willingly select muddy, frigid, ugly Mars when much more attractive worlds were available outside the Terran system).

Bibliography

• BattleCorps Solaris Broadcasting Co., 15/01/3072: "Touring the Grand Canal of Mars" (five parts)