Common yeast can survive Martian conditions

We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.

The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.

What if we are the bag of organisms?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water.

In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.

Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-)

I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.

Then we will never know if mars once had life that's different from earth life

Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).

Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus.

Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.

> Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.

That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.

Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.

We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.

> Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.

Their self-loathing of terran life, possibly the most fantastic thing that ever happened in the universe, is sad to see.

What is the point of a universe if there is no life to appreciate it?

> That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it.

Is it? To me, this sounds awfully similar in construction to 'The devs are always worried about tech debt and architecture, but they just want to polish their resumes to hold back the product' speech we are prone to hear from PM/MBA types.

Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back) over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)? Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?

But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars.

It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.

Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.

We won't have a place among the stars if we refuse to leave the Earth due to fear of "contaminating" the universe.

The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.

> What is the point of a universe if there is no life to appreciate it?

How can you know? The absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.

> colonization opportunity.

Some things are better left as-is. Not everything is up for grabs. Seeing the grappling effects of "seizing opportunities" on the Blue Marble and thinking that we can continue doing the same everywhere we can touch is...

telling.