Blog 28: Designing Life for Other Worlds
Hey everyone! Today I will be talking about a topic that will likely not be relevant for at least another decade. But hey, I guess you never know. What if I were to tell you that the way we explore space in the future might not be with rockets, but a microbe… In today’s world, we imagine future astronauts stepping onto Mars with high-tech suits, rovers, and habitats. But synthetic biology is potentially introducing a new idea: instead of forcing Earth life to survive in other worlds, why not engineer life that already fits there? For the first time in human history, we have the tools to design organisms that could help us breathe, grow food, build materials, and survive beyond Earth. The next space revolution might not come from NASA or SpaceX. It could come from biology. Why Space Is So Hard for Life Space is the most hostile environment we know. There is no oxygen, super intense radiation, extreme cold, toxic soils, microgravity, and it lacks the protective magnetic field that the Ea...