Our First Terraforming Goal Should Be the Moon, Not Mars

This is a nice argument for why humans should seek to inhabit the moon first, but I'm not sure I would call their proposal "terraforming".

There's no wide-scale alteration of atmosphere, temperature, surface, etc.

The moons low gravity makes human colinisation questioanable, even say with the wildly difficult many generational job of getting an atmospher (briefly) on the moon

Mars on the other hand appeals to civil engineers, romantics, adventurers, miners, and tycoons and just far away enough to stare at the ringing phone and go, naaaa, if head office wants something bad enough, they can send somebody

If your plan amounts to "set a space station down on the surface, fill flower pots with the soil from outside, then grow plants inside the station in those pots" - then why would you call that "terraforming"?

We should terraform Australia first.

Gigantic. Full of energy. Able to support massive inland freshwater lakes with desalinization. Essentially unlimited solar yet unable to utilize spare capacity. And it's already been wrecked from biological "terraforming" with non-native species.

If we can't figure out how to balance ecological and biological concerns on terra, we're not going to be able to do it extraterrestrially.

Our first terraforming goal should be the Earth, not the Moon, not Mars.

I.e. we're all threatened by the climate catastrophe and if we're not able to fix the planet we're the most fit to inhabit, the rest is just absolute lunacy.

Why not both ?

Like really - most people don't realize that Moon and Mars present very different environments with unique opportunities and challenges, such as:

- hard vacuum vs thin atmosphere - different communication latency to Earth - more vs less solar energy - 14 day day vs 25 hour day - abrasive dust vs less abrasive dust suspended in the atmosphere - 1/6 g vs 1/3 g

If we want to make use of the worlds of the Solar system, we will need to learn how to thrive in both sets of environments - many asteroids and space station operations in general are closer to the Moon while various gas giant moons (like Titan) and to a degree Venus are closer to Mars.