Lecture of the Week: Terraforming Mars
- From: "Wirt Atmar" <atmar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2006 20:55:38 -0400 (EDT)
The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for August 7, 2006 is now
available at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
The talks center primarily around evolutionary biology, in all of its
aspects: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology,
ecology, ethology, biogeography, phylogenetics and evolutionary biology
itself, and are presented at a professional level, that of one
scientist talking to another. All of the talks were recorded live at
conferences.
This is the twelfth lecture in a summer-long series on the new science
of astrobiology.
=====================================
August 7, 2006
Part XII: Astrobiology
Robotic Lunar Ecopoesis Test Bed
Paul Todd
Space Hardware Optimization Technology, Inc.
30 min.
"This is home. This is where we start again."
- Hiroko Ai, in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars"
Panspermia is a notion fostered in its modern form by Fred Hoyle and
Chandra Wickramasinghe. In this hypothesis, life did not originate on
Earth but rather was seeded here by impacting comets or asteroids.
Although Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's ideas have been poorly received by
the scientific community, we may be on the verge of enabling their
ideas, albeit in reverse. We are almost certainly going to take life to
Mars, if it doesn't already exist there.
In last week's lecture, Chris McKay spoke of the possibility of our
purposefully recreating a Mars capable of sustaining the life that
independently evolved on Mars, if it ever existed, rebuilding the dead
world that Mars is now into something flourishing with a second,
independent genesis of life.
But there is another possibility of much greater probability: life
never evolved on Mars. Rather we are going to take it there for the
first time and make Mars a living planet, terraforming it into an
Earth-like planet.
Ecopoesis is the process of creating conditions capable of autonomously
evolving a self-sustaining ecosystem on another planet. At the moment,
we only have the vaguest of ideas on how to accomplish this, but if
we're ever going to do it, it's going to be first done on Mars.
To preform ecopoesis, we're going to need practice. Quite a lot of
practice, in fact. In this week's lecture, Paul Todd describes work
that his company, Space Hardware Optimization Technology, Inc., is
performing to construct Mars simulators.
The intent of this work, which is funded by NASA's Institute of
Advanced Concepts (NIAC), is to create commercial systems that will
allow other laboratories to readily engage in ecopoeisis research, both
in the lab and on the Moon.
Beyond the mechanics, Paul also discusses at some length the candidate
"pioneer" organism(s) with which we will likely seed Mars. Although
there are a panoply of species on Earth which are capable of surviving
one or two aspects of the Martian environment, almost none can survive
all of the conditions that the planet presents, other than perhaps the
cyanobacteria. By consensus of current best guesses, these are
organisms that will most probably form the basis of the new ecosystem
we will attempt to build.
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