It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it's on the way to creating organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.
The goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on.
“For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay,” Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office said Monday at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference. As she said this, Jackson was pointing at an artist's rendering of a terraformed Mars.
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Knowing DARPA, I suspect they are going more for an Scalzi Future rather than terraform Mars. Then again, maybe DARPA is prepping Mars as the American bolthole in case we lose in a fight with China. ;)
Huh. I am all in favor of developing terraforming technology! But the time scale using that method (by itself that is) is probably longer than our species will reasonably be around in our current form. I wonder how they would get around the problem of Mars being too small and lacking a strong enough magnetic field to prevent the atmosphere from being ripped away--would microorganisms produce enough atmospheric gas to outpace the solar wind, particularly without the help of volcanism?
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