There's geological, and then there's ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, "should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?" doesn't really make much sense. There isn't anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn't one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

So, i read the "Red Mars" trilogy. I also keep up with research into the Martian atmosphere, its soil and geology.

My take is that all of this is still a pipe dream as much as it was 30 years ago when we did not know many of these things.
People don't want to see just how hostile Mars is to life. They pick a couple of the most obvious problems (e.g. radiation, no liquid water, no oxygen) and then they look for the first solution that seems viable and then declare Mars somehow liveable because look we can just implement those things.

But they are completely ignoring that: none of these proposed solutions have been implemented at scale yet, at least not outside of earth' atmosphere, there are hundreds of other known problems that often just don't make it to the head lines because they don't look that interesting or threatening (example: dust is suuuuper deadly on Mars, probably even worse than moon dust) and many problems will undoubtedly only become obvious once living beings are on the surface of Mars.

I am glad that there is hard sci-fi dealing with some of these problems in very optimistic ways, because we should try to better our understanding of them and not just give up, but we also should not have any illusions about how hard this task is and that this can take centuries of work.

Can we completely destroy one planet before we take on another?

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: