Common yeast can survive Martian conditions

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.

> 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?

> 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.