The push for the human race to become interplanetary is in full swing. Mars seems to be the planet that most have their interplanetary hopes and dreams set on, and for some, it’s not just hopes and dreams but research, time, effort, and money. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a branch of the United States Department of Defense, is an organization that is investing more than just emotion into the colonization of Mars, in fact they want to create organisms that will terraform Mars, creating an environment suitable for human habitation.
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.
Ambitiously and rather shockingly, DARPA’s research helps support a vision that, if successful, would completely alter Mars’ planetary composition. While it may be known as the “Red Planet” a transformation shown in a graphic created by Daein Ballard and featured in a Vice Motherboard report depicts Mars becoming extraordinarily Earth-like with weather, oceans, and greenery. While this will not be an accurate representation of Mars’ hypothetical transition, the image speaks to DARPA’s vision: a second earth.
The goal is to essentially pick and choose the best genes from whatever form of life we want and to edit them into other forms of life to create something entirely new. This will probably first happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but it sounds as though the goal may to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.
If this project comes to fruition, what will it mean for the future of space travel, and our interplanetary human race? Will we really be infecting planets with an army of organisms that will prepare a planet for our arrival? My mind is boggled, isn’t yours?
Let us know your thoughts on DARPA’s research. Do you think it is a waste of money and resources of a viable endeavour capable of changing our world in to our worlds?
[button link=”http://motherboard.vice.com/read/darpa-we-are-engineering-the-organisms-that-will-terraform-mars” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Motherboard[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
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