Thread: Martian soil 'Could support life'

Sensual. This stuff excites me too.

I love how they simplify certain analytical techniques to 'wet chemistry'. "Just add water! and then whack it in the oven, see what we get". ahh laymen's terms.

Awesome news.

cool, so when were done destroying this planet, we'll move onto the next

j/k, cool discovery, now the next mars lander mission must be called:

Operation Asparagus

The lander drops, plants the seeds and waters using the ice on mars

Carl Sagan once put forth a fantastic idea for terraforming Mars on his Cosmos program. I'm not sure if it was his original idea or not, but it stuck with me over the years. Now with this news, it seems even more viable.

Basically it goes like this. We already know how to genetically modify plants to enhance certain traits. What we first need, is a plant with these characteristics:

1. Relies as little as possible on atmospheric gasses that will not be present, and instead draws as much as it can from soil makeup and sunlight
2. Can survive in extreme cold
3. Is dark in color
4. Likes to spread

Most likely, none of this is very difficult for us to design.

Next we send up a mission to plant a lot of this over the ice-cap area. The dark color is important as it will not reflect back the sun's energy, instead using it to warm the surface. As more and more of the surface area of the ice caps is covered, more and more sunlight is retained, melting the caps to useful liquid water, further enriching the soil, and carrying streams outward to other parts of the planet.

As the planet warms and liquid water becomes more abundant, other types of plants will be able to survive, including those engineered for other jobs in terraforming, such as high oxygen producers.

It could take several hundred years before we even started seeing anything approaching a real atmosphere, but eventually we could transform the planet into a human-friendly environment.

Just something fun to ponder.

Yea, its too bad we won't be around to see it, well actually.......

This morning on the science channel this genetic engineer estimated that in 20 years we will be able to completely stop aging in its tracks and stop age related death.

So if this happens, we might see a green mars one day?

The atmospheric pressure is too low on mars for water to exist in liquid form. The ice, when dug up, sublimates directly to gas. The only way you're going to grow stuff on mars is to do it inside pressurized greenhouses. Martian atmosphere is 100 times lower pressure than earth's - it's barely more than a vacuum.

Originally Posted by Forsaken

The atmospheric pressure is too low on mars for water to exist in liquid form. The ice, when dug up, sublimates directly to gas. The only way you're going to grow stuff on mars is to do it inside pressurized greenhouses. Martian atmosphere is 100 times lower pressure than earth's - it's barely more than a vacuum.

This is absolutely true. However, I was speaking about genetically engineered flora, and I don't believe it necessarily has to be an unsurmountable obstacle (and neither did Sagan).

We have examples of life on Earth living under very extreme conditions, and a lot can be learned from these. It's not unreasonable to think that very low atmosphere growth is an attainable genetic engineering target.

How about we engineer plants that survive in extreme cold and extremely low pressure? there are plants at the bottom of the sea which withstand extreme high pressure, I'm certain life can find a way to survive low pressure, life ALWAYS finds a way to survive and thrive and spread.

Originally Posted by guerilla

How about we engineer plants that survive in extreme cold and extremely low pressure?

Thanks, I think I just said that.

Whoops.