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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.
“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.
With enough practice turning Earth’s damaged landscapes back into places hospitable for life, Jackson thinks we’ll have what it takes to eventually try to colonize the solar system. This is something that obviously doesn’t even really have a timeline, it’s technology that’s in its infancy, and much of the work being done is classified—but the implications are exciting nonetheless.
“After a manmade or natural disaster, we can think about recovering the environment,” she said. “These are the tools that, for the first time, are allowing us to go after that problem.”
NASA Eyes Ambitious Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moon Europa by 2025
NASA hopes to launch a mission to the Jupiter moon Europa, perhaps the solar system's best bet to host alien life, a decade or so from now, officials announced Tuesday (March 4).
The White House's 2015 federal budget request, which was released Tuesday, allocates $15 million to help develop a mission to Europa, which harbors a potentially life-supporting ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell.
www.space.com...
“For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth....
The perfect place of DARPA to introduce
a new organisms would be Europa, and
we are going there in 2025.
originally posted by: Komodo
How about
.........
We creating technology that will assist every human being to get a job, reduce housing costs and pretty much a better place to live~!!!?
In other words, SAVE earth AND IT'S inhabitants FIRST~!!!
originally posted by: Sillyosaurus
Terraforming is one thing. But to get life to cling they would have to figure out how to shield Mars from cosmic radiation.
m.sciencemag.org...
There is no magnetic field to shield the atmosphere in and the bad stuff out. So what's the point of atmosphere making critters?
Edit: That was a knee jerk reaction. I read the article and as I suspected the mars comment is hyperbole. Their umbrella corp like genetic modification may help our planet tho.
originally posted by: gatorboi117
BUT, if life already exists somewhere, I'm tempted to say leave it be, and not introduce our own, potentially hostile, lifeforms.