Scientists from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aim to warm up and potentially thicken Mars' atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesising plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren surface of the red planet.
"For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay," Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA's new Biological Technologies Office said recently at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference.
"There are anywhere from 30 million to 30 billion organisms on this Earth. We use two right now for engineering biology," she said.
"I want to use any organism that has properties I want - I want to quickly map it and quickly engineer it. If you look at genome annotation software today, it's not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes]," she was quoted as saying by 'motherboard.Vice.Com'.
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Genomes of several organisms can be pulled up on the programme, which immediately shows a list of known genes and where they are located in the genome.
"This torrent of genomic data we're now collecting is awesome, except they sit in databases, where they remain data, not knowledge. Very little genetic information we have is actionable," she said.
"With this, the goal is to, within a day, sequence and find where I can best engineer an organism," she added.
This will probably first happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but the goal may be to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.
DARPA plans to use specifically engineered organisms to help repair environmental damage.
Jackson said that after a natural or man-made disaster, it would be possible to engineer new types of extremophile organisms capable of surviving in a scarred wasteland.
As those organisms photosynthesised and thrived, it would naturally bring that environment back to health, she said.