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Reducing Plant Stress Leads to Martian Farms
Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "NASA is looking for ways to get plants to grow on Mars -- and surprisingly, reducing their stress is a good first step. By splicing genes from Earth-bound extremophiles into seeds whose descendants are destined for the red planet, scientists hope to breed plants that can handle the wide range of temperatures (pdf) that will be found on Mars."
I think you're confusing basic research with late-stage technology. Your concerns are not trivial, but the fact that they haven't been addressed in the pre-alpha stage of the basic research isn't very important, or interesting.
They're at very early stages, here. They're just trying to stick extremophile bacteria genes in a plant to see if they can use these genes to tailor the plant's genome at all. You have to understand this is a pretty radical mixture of genes. You're trying to cross a soybean with a deep-sea bacterium, after all. They might as well be crossing a human with a redwood tree to improve the height of the former. If plants can be tailored in this way successfully, then the sky's the limit, and your problems are likely to be easily addressed.
Point 1, the only thing special about -20C is that pure free water is frozen, which is inconvenient for water-based life. But temperatures that fall well below freezing for substantial periods of time are hardly unique to Mars: just spend a winter in North Dakota or Siberia. Indeed, it is more the rule than the exception here on Earth that temps are well below freezing for substantial parts of the year. Nevertheless, plants thrive here. They just go dormant when the temperature is too low, and grow when the temperature rises. Temps on Mars are above freezing for plenty of hours in the year.
Point 2, you have to remember that what plants really care about in an atmosphere is CO2, because that's where they get the carbon atoms to build proteins and so forth. The Earth has an air pressure of 1000 millibars, but only 0.036% of that (0.4 millibars) is CO2. Mars has an air pressure of only 7-10 millibars, but that's almost all CO2. So from a plant's point of view, the air on Mars is actually richer than it is here.