Life on Mars?
Could life exist on Mars? I'm not talking about right now, but could life on mars come from a seed planted by humans? I just finished watching a documentary that discussed this very idea. The concept of terraforming Mars includes warming the planet, planting plant life and eventually animals. All done by humans.
The idea is just starting to sink in for me, but wouldn't it be something if we could turn Mars into a living, breathing planet that not only sustains life but allows it to thrive?
For more, check out the wikipedia article on Terraforming.
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There's a lot of carbon dioxide already on Mars, locked up in the polar caps. That's not ice up there, it's frozen CO2. If it's not enough, I think the most plausible technology would be the introduction of genetically engineered microbes to produce more CO2 out of existing materials.
The biggest hurdle to terraforming Mars is that it would take hundreds of years, and no organization that has the resources to do it has that much foresight.
Personally I think the big elephant in the room is: wouldn't living on Mars be miserable? Humans evolved to crave the outdoors (on Earth, that is) and the effect that living on Mars will have on the human mind may be very ugly indeed.
My big issue is that this will give the most selfish among us an excuse to resume trashing the Earth. This is what breeding wildlife in captivity and reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone has done. Now the public just says, "Oh, that's good. If all the tigers go extinct in the wild, the zoos can just make more of them".
It's that selfish, materialistic attitude that makes the world uglier rather than more beautiful.
And I must say, I completely disagree with the notion of selfishness and materialism. I don't think that's how people think at all.
The history of evolution is pretty clear. Our species will either continue to expand into new territory, or we will eventually go extinct.
Yes, the human body evolved to live here on Earth, but it evolved in a very, very small range of climates. Humans now live in many climates that our bodies were just never designed for. We are extremely adaptable, which is our gift and eventually will be our curse if we breed ourselves into universal poverty. Even if we manage to find a way to balance our growth and environment into a permanently sustainable state, eventually something will happen - asteroid collision, solar fluctuations, global pandemic - that will threaten our species if we continue to keep all our eggs in one basket. Colonizing other worlds is something that we will do, or die.
And I don't think people will trash the planet more if there happens to be another one out there somewhere that we could live on, just like I don't trash my house just because there are other houses I could move to. Some people might use it as an excuse, but they are the people who would trash the planet regardless.
Oh, I completely agree that discovery makes the world more beautiful. I grew up facinated by Mars, and my aunt had the coolest book - it showed, if animals could live on other planets, what they would have to look like in order to survive. It made me want to study science and astronomy. It made me love animals.
However, discovery is different than mutating our natural world. Humans evolved to depend on the Earth for survival. If we had to create artificial conditions in which to live on a planet that does not support mammals, something would go wrong. Freaky diseases, freaky cancers. Like it or not, the Earth developed a natural world that would be almost impossible to recreate without dangers we face today by GMOs and other unnatrual technologies.
I may be 100 percent wrong - and if Mars were habitable, it would certainly take a big burden off of our Earth. That would be great! But from my limited scientific training, I took away a deep belief that nature created a world that will never be replicated in the same way. :)