There are two different possibilities to inhabit Mars:

1. take the environment with you

2. develop environment on Mars

The F100 make use of both possibilities

As a first step they:

a) take everything they need with them (oxygen + water, for instance)

b) build tents to live in

c) use rovers to travel around the planet's surface

d) use air miners to gain oxygen

e) use the northern polar cap as a water reservoir

As a second step they:

a) heat the atmosphere with: 1) windmills (p.179); 2) asteroid (p.441); 3) moholes

b) change the atmosphere in its gas constellation with: 1) GEMs; 2) lichen/algae(pp.225-227; pp.250-251)

c) melt the polar caps: - generate CO2 from the southern cap - generate H2O from the northern cap with the mirror system developed by Zubrin:

Zubrin's proposed mirror system would illuminate the poles from a low angle and would appear in the opposite area of the sky from the sun. However such a mass is equivalent to just five days worth of the Earth's production of aluminum, and whilst this would be impractical to ship from the Earth, there seems no reason why it might not be obtained by mining and manufacturing in space. The first space mirror has already been tested in Earth orbit (the Russian 20 m by their heating of Znamia project) and vastly larger variants are possible about Mars. If sufficient CO2 is produced the planet's poles, then this might act as the trigger for a much more extensive regolith degassing.

Paper by: Martin Poos & Kai Dautzenberg