> They built a device around as big as a golden retriever, shipped it to a planet 130 million kilo meters away, and that device is generating its own electricity and generating as much O2 as a tree
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.
I'm curious: do we currently have bacteria that could survive in the atmosphere of Mars? My understanding is that it would require controlled conditions and monitoring to make bacterial growth feasible under those conditions.
Conditions that support Liquid water is only transitory there. So you’re generally correct.
Most extremophiles we’re aware of tend towards high temps or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity and water presence. Which don’t line up with Mars much.
We’d have to be managing the environment they grew in, which makes it hard.
The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and biochemical availability of that energy. Life ‘eats’ to survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and biochemically hard to access, it’s not a good environment for life as we know it.
That's the point. Eventually we'll get to the point where we'll be able to mass manufacture at the molecular or atomic level. Until then the best we can do is coax living things into doing our bidding. But as you point out, it's not a solved problem. The point of the parent comment was that we're not there yet.
One you send humans that you can't sterilize before flight you will inevitably introduce bacteria into the environment anyway, and you will not be preselecting them either.
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.