Reading the "Mars Trilogy" by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the red planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there's always been a significant amount of humanity that thinks we shouldn't. A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and his co-authors skirts around the ethical and moral questions of whether we should and tries to take a long, hard look at whether we can.