Some 3.8 billion years ago, Mars had a thick atmosphere, higher surface temperatures than it does now and, according to some scientists, a large ocean that covered one-third of its surface.

Due to the solar wind, though, the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere, liquid water and surface heat. Nowadays it’s a barren planet with mean annual temperatures of -55 degrees Celsius (-66 degrees Fahrenheit), which roughly equates to the temperature of Earth’s South Pole in winter. Any water remaining on Mars either freezes or evaporates due to those extremely low temperatures as well as an atmospheric pressure that is about 0.6% of Earth’s mean pressure at sea level.

There may be no liquid water on Mars, but this doesn’t mean the planet is devoid of it. Mars has deposits of ice on its polar caps as well as abundant quantities of ice (an estimated more than 5 million cubic kilometers) locked away under its surface. If we were able to melt all of it (and keep it in liquid state), it would cover the entire planet with a 115-foot layer.

As you can see, the planet has a lot of potential. If we could find a way to create an atmosphere thick enough to stop the heat from dissipating into space, we would not only increase the atmospheric pressure, but also create the prerequisites necessary for terraforming the planet. Yes, I’m talking about creating a greenhouse effect on Mars.

It’s no secret that both Elon Musk’s Space X and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic want to establish communities on Mars. NASA has a plans of its own, and it likely won’t be long before we see first colonists on the red planet.

So how could Mars become more habitable? One way to do that would be to release carbon dioxide trapped in planet’s ice and frost. The problem here is that it’s almost impossible to tell just how much CO2 would be released this way, and there’s a risk there may not be enough to do the job. Furthermore, because of its location, the planet would first need to be sufficiently heated up.

Instead of relying on CO2, whoever wants to heat up Mars could use another, much more effective greenhouse gas — PFC, or perfluorocarbon — under a theory advanced by Margarita Marinova. She came up with the idea to create a greenhouse effect on Mars as an MIT student and is now a vehicle systems and propulsion engineer at SpaceX.

Aside from being superior to CO2 in warming the atmosphere, PFC is also ideal because of its long lifetime. Finally, the gas isn’t toxic to living organisms and it doesn’t deplete the ozone, which protects the planet from harmful UV radiation.

Mars does have an ozone layer, and on average, it’s 300 times thinner than the one on Earth. Growing and protecting this ozone layer is another objective of the Mars terraforming vision. The final goal would be to increase the temperature enough so that Mars starts releasing its own CO2. After that happens, PFC will be used only to plug the gaps, explains Marinova.

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Although this method seems promising, there are quite a few obstacles before this concept of terraforming Mars can become reality. First, we would need on-site PFC factories — perhaps hundreds of them—producing the gas to have enough of an impact on the planet’s atmosphere. Presumably we could send both the factory modules and the robots to assemble them by spaceship, rather than count on humans with a one-way ticket to Mars to do the work.

It would take a long time before these gasses can increase the temperature on Mars to the melting point of water. How long? How does 800 years sound?

Marinova says it could be shorter than that, since her 800-year estimate doesn’t include the effect of releasing the soil- and ice-bound CO2as the planet gets warmer. As scientists at NASA come up with more precise calculations of the amount of CO2 already present on Mars, the estimated date may get reduced, even down to a century.

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If that sounds a tad too long, remember that in this “short” period, we would be replicating the changes that previously took billions of years to complete.

Once atmosphere is there, plants would be next. They would process excess CO2 into O2, and Mars would be well on its way of turning into a hospitable home to the next generation of Martians. This next step might take thousands of years.

So, yeah. It’s possible, but it may take dozens of generations before humanity can see the fruit of its labor. Will it be worth it? I believe it will — for the generation of humans looking down on Earth from Mars, the blue planet that a long time ago was of a different hue.