Kolinar Advanced

6.0 UNDETECTABILITY

Welcome to Kolinar Advanced Level 6.

Three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the white sails of two hundred and fifty British men o'war, carrying General Lord Howe and twenty five thousand men, were sighted off the coast of Massachusetts.

In the seven years that followed, through the battles of Boston, Trenton, Brandywine, Ticonderoga, through the long winter at Valley Forge, and Cornwallis' final surrender at Yorktown, the poorly-equipped, underfed Sons of Liberty defeated a vastly superior redcoat fighting force, and overthrew the yoke of British tyranny.

The colonists earned their freedom not only from the mother country, but also from a belief system called the Divine Right of Kings, a doctrine which had ruled England politically since 1530. Instead of making Kings in America, the Founding Fathers erected a new form of government based on new ideas about republicanism and natural law being expressed in Europe at the time by Voltaire, David Hume, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The Constitution they built has withstood the test of centuries filled with unimaginable expansion and growth. And now, we have celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus discovering America, and the 35th anniversary of the first Moon landing.

Historians will put Columbus and Armstrong in the same category----not because the Moon is valuable, but because, like San Salvadore, where Columbus first landed, it is a stepping stone to a rich new frontier.

The new frontier, Mars, may be a desert planet today, but the scientific community believes we can change that. With surprisingly few exceptions, major scientists believe we should investigate the possibility of terraformation, though many doubt that Mars could be renovated for a price this planet could afford. The investment will be large, but the returns could be prodigious.

They propose that America, Asia, Europe, and Japan attempt the most ambitious engineering project in human history: the "terraformation" of Mars; the greening of the red planet. They want to transform Mars into a new homeland for humankind--and they believe we can do it in less than two centuries.

The human mind has a formidable record of accomplishment, but it may never have confronted a challenge as awesome as the terraformation of Mars. We will have to raise the entire planet's temperature by 100 degrees F, transmute its girdle of lethal gas into an atmosphere humans can breathe, erect a global shield against solar radiation, build heavy industries on Martian soil, construct farms and cities in biosphere bubbles, and transport thousands of people, plants and animals to Mars in a fleet of interplanetary arks. Even the most eager partisans are abashed by the size of the undertaking, but there is widespread agreement in the scientific community on how it might be accomplished.

Mars may be a desert planet today, but it is a desert planet with large polar ice caps. Scientists know how to melt these ice caps to yield water. They also know how to release the permafrost in the Martian soil to create an atmosphere.

Since an atmosphere will insulate the surface of the planet, allowing it to warm up, scientists predict that there could be trees, animals, and people on Mars in as little as 200 years. The technology for terraforming Mars has been widely reported in many scientific journals and popular magazines. (Mars could also be colonized with underground settlements, although that would be more expensive.)