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Reducing Plant Stress Leads to Martian Farms

Posted by Zonk on from the nothing-that-eats-people,-please dept.

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."

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Without nanotech it might be useful... by bradbury · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    The technology is only going to be useful if robust nanotechnology is *impossibly hard* -- Why? Because if it is possible it is highly probable that Mars *will not exist*.

    Why? Because the probable time to disassemble Mars is 12 hours once the asteroids have been developed into an array to harvest the entire solar power output of the sun. [1]

    So any work to "develop" Mars is either (1) assuming that nanotechnology is impossible -- which seems to fly in the face of physical laws as well as much NASA funding; or perhaps (2) that it will take a very very long time to become available (which would imply the people at NASA are *not* following the Moore's Law data...; or (3) that for some romantic reasons decisions will be made to not disassemble Mars -- and this is the realm of politics and requires a mandatory behavioral enforcement dictate unlike any humanity has been able to develop or dictate over thousands of years.

    I for one would like to see the carefully reasoned and thought out discussions that Mars will still exist in 30-40 years. For NASA to be funding efforts involving growing life on Mars points out how short sighted they are and how poorly they are educating the students they are educating.

    Instead of enzyme studies which will be pointless -- how about some studies of more advanced methods that might be used to disassemble Mars more quickly?

    1. Life at the Limits of Physical Laws