bu bu bu teh asteroidz

Surviving Mars is a dope-ass game. Even better with the terraforming pack. It is also a game, and nearly all of the advances that make your continued gameplay possible are so ridiculous that Kim Stanley Robinson would blush.

I remember back in the '80s when the idea for "breaking loose the carbon dioxide in the rocks" was proposed. It was proposed that we do this by lobbing something like 7-8x the combined US-Soviet nuclear arsenal at it every year for a hundred years. At the time, it was presented as a "we could feasibly do this if we really really really wanted to" solution that had the added advantage of repurposing the gun we had pointed at our heads (and then building 700 more into our children's children's children's future). Current snark focuses on Elon Musk's idea to melt the poles, not on the idea to release hypothetical calcium carbonate through repeated nuclear explosion; this guy doesn't even acknowledge that such an idea ever happened but lemme tell ya it was published in Analog between 1988 and 1992 and somewhere in New Mexico it's sitting on a shelf.

So yeah we can't terraform mars by nuking the shit out of it because of a whole bunch of reasons related to reality. It's good to know that there likely isn't enough CO2 to be had but I mean, we can still always bathe the place in r12 and r134a amirite?

The whole "myth...BUSTED" mentality of the skeptosphere mostly serves to validate laughable ideas as plausible ideas, and "It's official: we can't terraform Mars" only gives the nerds a whole new branch of whataboutism to play with.