Terra-Forming Alien Planets?

[Devious Viper]

Plants Redesigned To Live In Outer Space

Scientists are very interested in 'P. furiosus', a microbe that can survive extreme temperatures. It grows and thrives in underwater sea volcanoes  temperatures the same as boiling water. It also survives in almost freezing deep-sea water.

Researchers are concentrating on the deep oceans for inspiration on how to redesign plants for life deep in outer space. The inhospitable conditions facing life in space (extremes of temperature, drought, radiation and gravity) are not easily overcome by traditional plant defenses.

Botany Professor Wendy Boss and Amy Grunden, an assistant professor of microbiology, want to transfer beneficial characteristics from a sea-dwelling, single-celled organism called Pyrococcus furiosus into model plants, such as tobacco and Arabidopsis, or mustard weed.

NASA is funding the research.

"This is very fundamental research," Boss said. "If we could add new genes to plants, we could potentially make the plants more resistant to extreme conditions such as drought and extreme temperatures that we have on Earth, but also to the extreme conditions that one might find on Mars."

Could this be the start of the mission to colonise and terra-form Mars?

[omnipotentoculus]

Terra forming is a very very interesting concept, especially in the guise of using microbes and plants to do it. Part of the problem with many other planets is that thought they might be terraformed initially, problems would still arrise. Venus has no magnetosphere, which woud mean anything living there would be subjected to instantaniously fatal levels of radiation. On Mars, conversely, the gravitational pull is not strong enough to maintain an atmosphere. In the case of other worlds, we will have to adapt our housing to them, the planets will not adapt to Earth.

[mike624]

that makes you wonder what the possiblities are for life elsewhere. if theres so many different factors that make it difficult for life to form on other planets besides are own  it makes the chance of other life elsewhere small.