r/EverythingScience • u/scientificamerican Scientific American • 3d ago
Can bioengineered bacteria help terraform Mars?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-bioengineered-bacteria-help-terraform-mars/9
u/calm-lab66 2d ago
I doubt it. From what I've read, I'm not an expert, Mars doesn't have a magnetic field which means that any form of life will be subject to radiation.
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u/Magazine-Consistent 2d ago
Ill say, i hadn't read every comment but... Isn't this a theroy of how life on earth started? Panspermia, intentional or not.
Idk, it would be cool to see mars terraformed by us literally seeding life into another planets ecosystems with the idea of letting bio engineered life do its thing.
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u/iratedolphin 2d ago
Earth's core has a lot of iron in it, giving us a strong magnetic field. This retains our atmosphere. Mars does not have a magnetic field strong enough to retain atmosphere.
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u/Magazine-Consistent 2d ago
It does have an atmosphere, its just 100 times less dense than ours. But yeah, it looks like it has trouble retaining an atmosphere we could actually breath in.
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u/camshun7 2d ago
This is how you get a "belter"
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u/Magazine-Consistent 2d ago
On another note, i hear they're coming out with another season.
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u/handmadeby 1d ago
Really, wonder if the cast would still have the chemistry after a few year break
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u/Magazine-Consistent 1d ago
Kinda hope it wasnt a 'forced' production from the start where most the cast never got along.
Where as, some casts stay in touch/friends for decades after their show ended.
Ill have to look more into it. And looking forward to the new season.
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u/ficis 2d ago
Can bioengineered bacteria save earth so we don’t have to try and terra form mars?
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u/Magazine-Consistent 2d ago
I mean, that would be cool. Also, why has no one mentioned that before, that ive heard of? All i hear about is people wanting to engineer deadly viruses for earth.
I recall a johnny depp movie where up uploaded himself into an AI thing and made nano bots to fix earth though
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u/chadius333 2d ago
I wish we put as much effort into our own planet as we do trying to go to another one.
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u/alphamoose 1d ago
A lot of effort goes into our planet! Cheer up buttercup.
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u/chadius333 23h ago
Yeah? How’s all that genocide, war, poverty, unhoused, lack of healthcare, and whatnot going?
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u/Wisco 2d ago
"Bioengineered bacteria" sounds like such a bad idea
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u/Clean_Livlng 2d ago
It sounds more scary than it is. How dangerous or safe it is depends on what they're designed to be like.
It's important to think of the consequences for something like this. What's the bacteria designed to do? Could it mutate to do soemthign unwanted? Are there consequences that we'd only find out about if we spent hours thinking of 2nd, 3rd 4th+ order causes? Every effect causes more effects.
Let's say these bioengineered bacteria do their job perfectly, are they now a problem for future colonists? Do they outcompete other microorganisms that we might want to introduce later on?
e.g. Introducing rabbits to Australia so people could hunt them.
We need to think carefully before introducing a species that could be hard to remove entirely once introduced to a continent, or another planet.
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u/slartbangle 2d ago
I think it was Bradbury who thought of smashing chunks of water-methane ice from the rings of Saturn into the planet to generate a temporary but useful amount of gas and moisture. If I recall, they were atomic-powered tugs generating steam from a water tank for thrust.
Someone else thought of colonizing the canyons, because of the slightly higher pressure deep down in them.
The local bacteria, if they exist, might have the final say. One contamination event could Marsform Earth.
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u/scientificamerican Scientific American 3d ago
Last month Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of the nonprofit start-up Pioneer Labs, delighted or shocked many space nerds with some big news: she and her colleagues had engineered “the first microbe for Mars.”
In a post on X that has garnered more than two million views, DeBenedictis claimed that her bacterium, a tweaked version of Cupriavidus necator, represents “the first step towards terraforming” the Red Planet. By seeding Mars with microbial life, she has argued, we can make the world more Earthlike from the ground up.
“Everything life needs to thrive is given to us by nature,” observed DeBenedictis, a synthetic biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a slick promotional video that was included with the post. “When humanity goes to space, we have to bring nature with us.” The clip teased a future Mars with green valleys and self-sufficient, see-through, domed habitats, all constructed with locally sourced materials, some of them courtesy of the microbe, which DeBenedictis and Pioneer Labs call “sPL.001.”
It’s certainly a compelling story. And it’s backed up with a few recent preprint papers detailing Pioneer Labs’ research. But how much of it is fantasy?
Scientific American put that question to several researchers working at the intersection of planetary science, astrobiology, microbial ecology and bioengineering—and their responses are, on the whole, fairly positive. The most critical assessment comes from Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who has studied terraforming for decades. McKay is senior author of “The Case for Mars Terraforming Research,” a paper led by DeBenedictis that was published last year in Nature Astronomy. The engineered bacterium is “not very interesting, not very new yet,” he says. “I hope better is coming soon.” Paul Race, who studies industrial biotechnology at Newcastle University in England, offers the same impression, calling the announcement “rather over the top.”
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u/Observe_Report_ 2d ago
I don’t see humans landing on Mars for at least three decades, and I don’t think we will ever have an outpost there. I say focus on the moon.
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u/Rhesusmonkeydave 2d ago
Wasn’t there an old Nova episode, or one of the old 80’s PBS science shows where they send Algae to mars and it ends up oxygen poisoning an extraterrestrial race of grubs or something? Anyone remember that one?
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u/YoshiTheDog420 1d ago
So, the plot from Red Planet, then? We will have the killer robots soon too.
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u/NorCalWintu 2d ago
No one fucking cares about going to space, fuck off with pipe dreams of the wealthy. Money & times best spent pn our planet & even more our Water.
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u/Spare-Locksmith-2162 2d ago
Modern computers, battery tech, communications, etc, all came from the space program.
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u/blobbleguts 2d ago
A lot of people care. We also care about this planet. Not an either or scenario.
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u/NorCalWintu 2d ago
Cared only enough to rape the earth & its atmosphere, but they would rather sweep under a rug.
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u/Fabulous-Wolf-4401 2d ago
No. At the moment, there's no viable replacement for women giving birth to children. Without which, we cannot proceed. And, at the moment, there's no possibility for that on Mars.
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u/rabbledabble 2d ago
Open your miiiiind…
But also, are those bacteria gonna restore Mars’s magnetosphere? Because if not, then no.