Re: Cool man, real cool
Terraforming Mars isn't all that hard. Strap a set of great big engines to Ceres and crash the thing into the south pole. Ceres + polar deposits have enough volatiles that - combined - there should be a reasonable atmosphere. The impact - while it would leave an interesting crater - shouldn't shatter the planet, nor blow the flimsy extant atmosphere off. So yes, you'd have half the planet being molten for a few hundred years to deal with, but that's a relatively minor issue. (It should also help offset the cooling wrought by the dust kicked up, making the thicker atmosphere a net gain.)
This shouldn’t actually be all that big a deal to accomplish. You need a set of holy-shit nuclear power plants on Ceres, an automated mining facility that extracts non-volatile (rock/mineral) mass from the planet for use as propellant (don’t waste your volatiles!) and a set of big-ass ion engines.
You vaporise the mass, ionise it and huck it out the engine at a significant fraction of c. This is a simple impulse engine/hall thruster/VASMIR design. It doesn’t provide a huge amount of thrust – well, okay, with nukes powering the thing, the thrust will be insane, but so is the dwarf planet we’re trying to move – but it will be a constant thrust. That is how we get new horizons out to Pluto in short time frames, or move Dawn out to go check on the dwarf planet under discussion.
You’ll need some RCS thruster quads (probably chemical) for steering, but here you can probably afford to burn some volatiles in order to provide the moderate amount of reaction mass you need.
So, a trillion dollars or so, about 250 years to move the dwarf and another 250 before Mars is tectonically stable enough to think about colonising and *bam*, whole other planet to work with.
Converting the atmosphere into the right oxy/nitro mix, that’s a whole other issue. Still, the ability to walk around outside with no pressure suit, nor cold-weather gear would be a huge thing. Wearing a small oxygen mask is a minor inconvienience.