 So, people have been talking about colonizing Mars for a really long time. Like ideally there will be this whole city up there that we can take vacations to where everyone wears high fashion space suits and has a pet rover named Curiosity. But now that we know that there's frozen water in the soil on Mars, this fantasy seems actually possible. So if we were to colonize Mars, how would we actually do it? One company called Mars One is hoping to start a human colony in 2025. First, Mars One will send a rover to scout the best location, somewhere with flat ground near the equator to maximize solar power, but also close to a big chunk of that frozen water. The next step is building the habitat. Right now they're thinking they'll want two rooms for living quarters, two rooms for supplies, and two rooms for life support. The life support system takes Martian soil, puts it in an oven, and evaporates the ice particles, extracting water and oxygen. Next, humans arrive. A small crew of four sets up the rest of the habitat. The ultimate goal is to create an environment hospitable enough that people can make babies. That's what a colony is. Mars One wants to grow food indoors, but a lot of people think that any real Mars colony will need years of delivered Earth food before it can feed itself. One sort of weird science possibility is bioengineering new organisms that can survive the Martian climate. Making giant nutritionally enhanced cockroaches that we could grind down into a space NutriBar. Or maybe not. There is another option. Terraforming. This is really out of science fiction, but basically we pump all these gases into the Martian atmosphere until it heats up to something more livable, like a deliberate global warming. Other proposed methods include spreading dark dust from Mars' moons on the ground, crashing asteroids into the planet, or installing giant space mirrors to provide extra warmth and solar power. Besides the obvious stuff, there are some really weird problems with Mars. Like there could be dangerous bacteria we don't know about that gets the colonizers sick. Mars is also subject to a lot of radiation and we don't know what the long-term effects of that on humans will be. Like they could end up with some sort of horrible Mars cancer. Also, Earth websites will take between 6 and 45 minutes to load. There's just a lot to worry about. But despite the drawbacks, Mars is still our best shot at colonizing another planet. It has water, it gets enough sun for solar power, and its day and night cycle is very similar to that of Earth's. So why should we let a little thing like the lack of an ozone layer stop us?