My megaproject ideas are mostly pretty standard. I'd build a high speed rail network across North America, and build and expand metro and regional rail systems in and around every city. I'd turn all cities and suburbs into fifteen-minute cities. I'd decommodify housing, and build ten million units of public/social/non-market housing, mostly three bedroom units. I'd link those last three policies together by building TODs around the new Metro and rail stops. And I'd build bicycle networks in every town and city and connect them to the TODs. I'd build bridges and walkways across skyscrapers. I'd put a bidet in every American toilet (uses less water than toilet paper apart from being more comfortable). Fiber internet in every home. A heat pump in every home. An induction stove in every kitchen. Phase out fossil fuels and power everything with Pumped Storage Hydropower and Geothermal. I'd make the US go Metric.
But my truly crazy, obsessive idea would be to bring back the French Revolutionary calendar. Or I'd purge all French influences from English.
I guess it depends on the scale of regime I'd have. Once all the normal stuff happens and people have housing, good jobs, transit, food, healthcare, literacy, half the earth rewilded, and everything else, I'd go buckwild.
We're gonna set up Mars for terraforming. Put a big fuckoff magnet at L1, and put a particle accelerator on Phobos to create a torus of plasma along its orbit, do 'em both, we need a backup because this shit has to last a billion years. Smack it with some ammonia-rich asteroids, shotgun the surface with extremophile lichens and bacteria, build some ecopoiesis domes. Just let it go wild. Not a colonization attempt, just create a trickle of progress and let it slowly improve over time and go wild til we're actually ready to do something with it.
We're going to learn everything we can and we'll save all of our knowledge. We will learn everything we can, uncover old mysteries, and explore. The only limiting factor for sciences should be people-hours. And we're going to make backups. Off-site ones too, maybe even off-world. We should never forget anything ever again.
We're going to preserve languages and learn a universal second language. Teach everyone Esperanto or something, but make sure that people's native languages are preserved and retained. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may be bullshit, but I think there's a lot of cultural value in preserving languages. It'd be great for everyone to be able to communicate together, but it's important that we're not losing things along the way to that goal.
Venus would be more viable
Both are orders of magnitude more difficult than housing an equivalent population in space habitats
Though at least with Venus, with a big enough solar shade you could freeze the atmosphere and fling the CO2 into space
Yeah, could freeze the atmosphere and then ship that to Mars. That's also another solid option instead of using the Vesta Moon proposal I also replied with. It's not about difficulty, it's about fun! Just dropping a big dipole magnet in front of Mars and maybe another big dipole magnet (and i guess a solar shield depending on viability of construction) in front of Venus and another is really all I wanna do right now til we can figure stuff out.