DARPA Is Already Working On Designer Organisms To Terraform Mars

MarkWhittington writes: Space visionaries dream of a time when human beings will not only settle Mars, but will terraform the Red Planet into something more Earth-like, with a breathable atmosphere, running water, and a functioning biosphere. Evidence exists that Mars was more or less Earth-like billions of years ago before the atmosphere leached away into space and the water became frozen under the ground and at the poles. Terraforming Mars is decades away from the beginning and probably centuries away from the end. But DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already genetically engineering organisms that will help turn the Red Planet blue, according to a story in Motherboard.

Comments

Re:Magnetic Field?

[PPH]

Simple. We'll make our own.

I figure it will take a loop around Mars equator carrying 850 million Amperes to get something similar to Earth's magnetic field strength. Figuring a Niobium-Tin superconductor (200,000 A/cm^2 critical curent density) that would take a superconductor of about 70 cm across.

See how easy an engineering solution is. I'll leave the details to the subcontractors to work out.*

*I used to work for Boeing. How did you guess?

Re: root problem

[davester666]

So, you are saying we have to nuke the core of Mars to restart it's rotation? I think I saw a documentary on how we did this here on Earth just after the turn of the century...