Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attractive.

Presuming you could do it at all (and that's a pretty big assumption) it isn't going to be blown away in a few years. It would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years for the atmosphere to decay. It certainly would endure long enough for a colonization effort, but that presumes you can pull it off, and again, that's a massive "if". You would need some really huge rockets to intercept and redirect comets and other material to start bulking up the atmosphere.

In a future where we have fusion or some other form of energy, aka Star Trek, I suppose why not. A few decades or centuries of robot spacecraft smunching stuff into Mars wouldn't cost much more than not doing it at all.

What I've heard as a rough estimate is that if somehow someone was able to give Mars a dense atmosphere (thicken it with water vapor, nitrogen and a whole more CO2 to create a greenhouse effect) it would probably endure for a million years, but without replenishment, eventually the solar wind will indeed just blow it away. As to create a sufficient magnetic field, well, I don't see how it's actually possible to create that large a magnetic field without a helluva lot of energy. I don't know if there is an engineering solution without magical far future technology to shield Mars' atmosphere from the solar wind. I've read of some guys suggesting we bombard the planet with comets and other debris to kick start the various cycles (carbon, nitrogen, water) as well as create a whole lot of heat to start melting the large amounts of water, but for that we're talking if not super far future planetary engineering, then at least we're talking about really big rocket engines (probably nuclear) shoving all kinds of gunk at Mars from every corner of the solar system.

Who knows, maybe in a few centuries the technology will exist to pull it off. Mars certainly seems the most likely body in the solar system to terraform. It is, by some estimates, still in the Goldilocks zone, so providing there's a sufficiently dense atmosphere with enough CO2 to actually capture more solar radiation, it might work. But it really would take a whole other level of technology to protect that atmosphere from steadily being eroded, and stop everyone from getting horrible cancers along the way.

Fuck you! I use tar for all my version management. Now get off my lawn!

Yes, well, Democrats didn't use the magic formula "To Protect Our Children!" as in "We Need Everyone To Have Large Capacity Semi-automatics TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!" or "We Need To Keep Vomiting Vast Quantities of GHG's Into The Atmosphere And Allow Poisoning Of Water Sheds TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!"

Republicans, standing for smaller invasive government; unless it involves the use of genitals or what you read on the Internet.

There's also the rather unique aspects of Darwin's theory as opposed to previous theories, such as Lamarck's theory. That organisms seem to fit into hierarchies was in and of itself not a new idea, though I would argue Linnaean taxonomy with its fairly strict methodology was a new innovation. Darwin's key observation wasn't merely that populations evolve, but rather that there is variation exists in all populations, and that some variations will be more favorable than others, and thus more likely to be selected for through differential reproductive success. While he didn't have Mendelian genetics which when plugged in to Natural Selection, provided the hereditary aspects of the theory, but he did make that critical observation that was very different from anyone else's previous stab at some sort of evolutionary process.

I'm not really all that sure that anything resembling Darwin's theory of natural selection could have developed without Linnaean taxonomy, not to mention that unlike much larger biospheres, the Galapagos Islands could be more easily observed, so I think it unlikely that da Vinci would have had the kind of environmental exposure.

Who exactly is cancelling Charles Darwin? This looks like some manufactured outrage, a strawman you can beat endlessly without ever having to get out of your echo chamber.

Jesus, grow up.

Unfortunately they also put the immunocompromised at risk along the way. I have absolutely no issue with people flinging themselves off cliffs. When they tie a rope to an innocent bystander and pull them down as well, then I have an issue.

Clearly they have too much money in the bank to spend on frivolous lawsuits. Sounds like they need to pay a lot more taxes.

Because rule by technocratic corporation is just such a big win. Your's is a perfect example of how our chimpanzee brain can overwhelm those faculties that make us human. Greed is based largely on short term gain (your paycheck right now) and not on long term prosperity (what will my paycheck look like if the government and unions are hamstrung or outright eliminated from labor regulation and negotiation).

So what is it? Are you a chimpanzee, or a human being?

It will be the standard Conservative talking point; that the recession doesn't really exist, it's all these evil economists, many of them civil servants, trying to get Labour elected. Labour has now been out of power so long that it can't be directly blamed for the woeful state of the British economy, so the next strategy is to deny there is a problem at all.

All the Brexit "dividends" that were promised have proven phantoms. Creating any kind of friction with your primary trading partner is utter stupidity. Britain has been a merchant nation since the Middle Ages, with deep links to the Continent. In fact, whether it was the Habsburgs, Napoleon, the Kaisers or Hitler, the primary objective was to create a continental system that would keep Britain out. Heck, even de Gaulle got in on the "keep Britain off the Continent" when he blocked Britain's entry into the customs union at a time when Britain's economy was falling over a cliff.

And lo and behold, this time it wasn't some Continental demagogue trying to wrench Britain away from Europe, it was the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson who accomplished what Britain had been fighting to prevent since the Battle of Agincourt.

I think a review of post-WWII history will show that Britain spent decades in a spiraling decline. It's empire and the kind of locked in economy that that vast empire had created began to disintegrate. The huge debts accrued between the late 1930s and 1945, much of it owed to the United States in one form or another, left it the sick man of Europe. It probably would have entered the Customs Union earlier, but de Gaulle had an absolute hatred of the British and did everything he could do to block it. A seemingly permanent turn around happened as it integrated into the European economic community. It had to replace its Empire with something; and the Commonwealth had proven an enormous failure; with the preeminent Commonwealth nations like Canada and the Australia resigning their economic relationship with the UK to the dust heap.

Indeed. An alternate title for this story could be "Europe Resists Race To The Bottom"