If so, this should not preclude us from cleaning up our own planet first!

  • No, not really. Mars has a very weak magnetosphere, so you need shielding against radiation. Also there is no atmosphere and any atmosphere we put on mars will quickly (in a geological timescale) get blown away by the charged solar winds because there is no magnetic field. So it’s an immense task, and probably a few hundred years out before we have the technology.

    • That’s what I thought. We would have to figure out a way first to either start Mars’s core spinning again or to artificially create a magnetosphere to be able to keep an atmosphere in place. Neither of which we have the capability to do.