>>97562971you wouldn't need to make the whole planet livable just enough of the surface area to set up bases/mini towns to use as a transport point plus, like early humans, you would only need a handful of them to start reproducing and populating it. The issue of the amount of gear needed doesn't matter when we already have 3D printers and machines/vehicles to move things around easily.
Just set up a few building sized greenhouse domes with oxygen pumps inside to live in while you use basic normal-ass construction vehicles and equipment to dig craters into Mars' ground and pour tonnes of water in sent on rockets, then start filling them with gallons of oxygen-producing algae/bacteriia. Dig trenches around these man-made lakes to fill with soil to grow trees/crops in with artificial aunlight/UV streetlights set up around them. That would be the basic start and could be done in a decade.
It's not like the Martians would have anything else to do all day other than work on the planet anyway. You could easily have terraformed a good chunk of it in a generation.
The issue of 'but what about solving muh problems on Earth first' doesn't matter since governments and agencies multitask all the time anyway and the first inhabitants would all be bored millionaires with money to burn. Simple as.
