Well with a sudden renewed interest in space, and in Mars, I was thinking about this question today, and specifically the moral aspects. Is it right for us to take a plaint, that has no visible life on it, and radically change it’s atmosphere for our needs? Is this a case of playing God? Good management of a valuable resource? A environmental disaster waiting to happen? A important part of space settlement?
What are your thoughts and ideas? 
I think we should start by shipping all the politicians there. Give it a head start. They will need some tactical support, so we should follow up with all the marketing people and pollsters, then television executives. For good measure, send all cable TV installers and repairmen too.
Don’t forget: Lawyers, Baggage Handlers, UPS people, and HMO’s.
And they’ll need some entertainment. Recorder players can go too!
(sincere apologies to anyone in any of those industries. i am kidding, except in the case of recorder players)
I don’t think it’s right to dump our toxic waste on an innocent planet.
Hmmm, i guess the telephone sanitizers would have to go too, then!
Of course, we wouldn’t want to send them all. A virus spread by handling infected telephones might wipe out Earth’s entire population.
SICNR: I would like to suggest, you try to persuade the US Government to ratify the Kyoto-Agreements. 
Brigitte
Brigitte, First we’d have to convince Bush that it was going to help with our “War on Terror” 
Loren
Just convince him it’s* a weapon of mass destruction.
*Substitute your favorite eco-unfriendly group\industry; petroleum companies, coal fired power plants, SUV manufacturers, Wal-mart, Hello Kitty…
If the question is: should we use Mars as a dump?..I think the real issue is being sidestepped–i.e. let’s explore ways to not produce so much crap.
If the question is: Is commandeering a seemingly uninhabited planet “playing God,” then I get cranky because it seems any time there are accusations that human innovations are moving us into God’s turf, the implication is that humankind should set limits on its creativity and potential because of someone’s religiously-derived notion of what their conceptualization of God would want. (How’s that for a Melvillian too-long sentence?)
What living organism says “I may become this smart and capable but no smarter?”
The question should not be whether an innovation is “playing God;” it should be “is this more beneficial than detrimental, and can it be done without digging our crap-heap any deeper?”
Given enough time it will happen. For good or bad. All in all the human species is certainly capable and wise enough to do this correctly but will it do so in the end only time will tell - we don’t exactly have a great track record here…
But rest asured it will happen. Remember that even if a terraforming project were to be undertaken tomorrow, (assuming all the needed technology was ready now and in place) we’re still looking at centuries down the road before Mars or any other viable world would resemble anything even close to a habitable world…
Yes, the Martian atmosphere is cold and thin. The first step in Terraforming would be to give it a lot of hot air.
Terraforming? THERE’S a disaster waiting to happen. We’ve been working on that for some millennia already, now, and… well, check the results.
Throw-away society on a multiglobal scale.
Where did all the “dumping toxic waste on Mars” comments come from? That’s not what the original poster was talking about (at least not directly), unless someone misunderstood the term terraforming.
Here’s a nice link:
I’m all for it! …and we need to get on it quick! Establish a Moon base right away (the only good idea Bush has had, and unfortunatley, probably for all the wrong reasons). We have to get a functioning Moon base up and working before we could expand to Mars.
If we don’t do it soon things are going to get really nasty here on Earth before too long, unless we have some kind of huge natural disaster that reduces our population by a significant amount.
P.S. I probably read way too much Science Fiction. 
-Brett
Which fleshes out my previous post and the prediction that went with it. Sorry folks, I’m kinda pessimistic today. After so much time, have we learned enough not to trash Mars as well?
Actually, I hope so.
Nan,
NASA, the American people, the ESA, any multinational space agencies or anyone else who’s willing to put forth the monetary (not to speak of time) investments to take on a project of this scale isn’t going to do so just to trash anything. Would you? Humans aren’t perfect it’s true, but something on this magnatude is going to be EXTREMELY well monitored.
Even so, we can all rest assured it won’t be completed (in fact we’ll be lucky to see even the very first steps begun) until well after we’re all long since dust in our graves…
Here are three terraforming methods that have been proposed:
Also using Mars as a toxic waste dump doesn’t
sound cost effective. Transportation costs run
kinda high.
We’ll just have to polute
the moon. Best
Brian, I do hope for the best. I do every day, despite what I see around me. As I mentioned, I’m just in a pretty pessimistic mode today. Besides, somebody has to play devil’s advocate, right? 
Lawrence Sterne beats 'em all hands down for longest sentence in literature. (Tristram Shandy)
Sorry there Nan…I misread your intent. We can all use a little from time to time right?