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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 heard that singing to plants helps thenm grow and reduce their stress levels. Now all we need to do is to perform some experiments and figure out what type of singing/music genre provides the best stress relief. I'm thinking reggae would do the trick personally... >_>
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We should send a bunch of kudzu to mars. That stuff will grow anywhere.
Badass Resumes
I'm not criticising.. but surely research into plants that can take extremes is of more short-term utility in creating species which can suck up and withhold pollutants as part of a clean-up operation for Earth than in sustaining the "great-post-armageddon-earth-bug-out" destination?
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Plants will grow if their stress levels are reduced while astronauts die from being exposed to cosmic radiation. Somebody must love plants.
If this stress thing applies to people too... how are they going to have any IT staff on Mars?
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I think if you are engineering life for Mars you need to be developing cold tolerance, more than heat tolerance which is what this experiment seems to be doing. The concept is the same but you have to wonder why they they made their choice of extremeophiles. The averge surface temperature on Mars is around -55C. The hottest you see is 27C which is a very warm summer day. Developing tolerance for 4-100C doesn't quite fit.
You wonder why they aren't working with extremeophiles from the Arctic, Antarctic and high mountains instead of ocean vents.
@de_machina
Wouldn't this contaminate the soil of mars, by introducing lifeforms from another planet? I mean, we still have a lot of research left to do on mars, and I don't think putting plants to grow on mars is going to help at all.
scientists hope to breed plants that can handle the wide range of temperatures that will be found on Mars.
Just come to Ottawa (Canada). Minus 35 C in the winter, plus 35 C in the summer! And I see corn growing across the street. Why am I living here again...might as well move to Mars.
PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
They should start with apple(not Apple). After all, they too deserve their own sin.
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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.