Cover story · Terraforming · 9 min read

Could we green a red planet? Start in the outback.

Sci-fi loves turning Mars blue. Desert soil science and outback analogue sites give a more honest answer to how far off that really is.

Words: sci-fi.au editors · Sample article · Score: editorial estimate, 2026

FIG. 1: Generative cover art, seeded from the slug “terraforming-mars”.

In the stories, it takes a montage. A few orbital mirrors, some hardy moss, a century of fast-forward, and the red planet is wearing a blue sky. In the real world, the first question isn't about plants at all. It's about air.

Mars has an atmosphere less than one per cent as thick as ours at the surface. Water there boils or freezes rather than pooling. Without a global magnetic field, radiation reaches the ground. Any garden would need to fix all three before it could put down roots.

The outback as a stand-in

Australia has an unusual advantage for thinking about this: some of the driest, oldest, reddest ground on Earth. Researchers use arid outback regions as Mars analogue sites to test equipment and learn how life clings on in harsh soil. In WA's inland Pilbara, fossil stromatolites (layered rocks built by microbes) about 3.48 billion years old are among the oldest evidence of life on the planet, and living stromatolites still grow at Shark Bay on the coast. Both come up often in the search for past life on Mars.

Field note
Biological soil crusts, thin living skins of cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses, hold desert soil together and fix nutrients. They're the closest thing Earth has to a “first coat of paint” for barren ground, and they grow slowly, over years to decades.

Lab experiments have shown some microbes can survive simulated Mars conditions for a time. That is a long way from thriving, let alone transforming a planet. But it's a real, testable first rung on the ladder.

What the montage skips

A widely cited study looked at all the carbon dioxide Mars might release from its ice caps and soil, and concluded that with today's technology there isn't enough accessible to thicken the air to Earth-like levels. Other schemes, from orbital mirrors to importing gases, run into problems of scale that make them theory at best.

So we score terraforming Mars low, and we explain why below. Before you scroll on, try the toy. It's honest about one thing: the green you paint is the easy part.

Interactive · toy, not a simulation

Green a red planet

Drag across the planet to paint life on it. Keyboard: focus the planet and press Enter, or use the button.

Planet greened0%

    Why 11%?

      The Aussie angle

      See how terraforming sits against fifteen other sci-fi ideas, and how its score has moved since 2016, on the Reality Map. Want this score on your own site? Embed the widget.

      Sample article: written to demonstrate the design, not yet fact-checked for publication