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Life on Mars: Are humans one step closer to living on Mars?
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With the pressing idea that humans have to find suitable life outside Earth in mind, many projects and experiments are being conducted to find a livable environment on Mars. The planet is not yet suitable to live on but a new project suggests that they may have the solution. Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that they are developing a terraforming technology hoping to modify Mars' environment, including its atmosphere.
Highlights
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)
6/29/2015 (1 decade ago)
Published in Green
Keywords: DARPA, Terraforming Mars, Earth, Life. Suitable, Living, Organisms, Bioengineering, Development, Outside Earth, Atmosphere, DTA GView
MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - "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," said the deputy director of Darpa's Biological Technologies Office in Virginia, Alicia Jackson.
The idea is that the agency will develop organisms with characteristics to transform the environment in the red planet, making life possible. According to The Daily Mail, this toolkit has all types of species with genetically engineering properties. At the moment, there are only two species, e. coli and yeast, being used in synthetic biology projects, while there are about 30 billion of them on Earth.
"I want to use any organism that has properties I want - I want to quickly map it and quickly engineer it," added Jackson. To help them locate specific organisms with the specific genes they are looking for, a new software dubbed as the Google Map of genomes was made - the DTA GView.
In some theories, they believe organisms can be bio-engineered to pull out some of the unnecessary and toxic gases out of the planet to transform Mars' atmosphere to something similar to Earth's, which human beings and other species need to breathe and live on without wearing a spacesuit.
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