Teraforming

Everybody knows that the first person to discover extraterrestrial life is going to go down in the history books forever. Maybe it is shaking hands with ET or maybe it is simply taking a meteorite fragment and putting it under a microscope and exclaiming "BY JOVE! This bit of something isn't from around here and it's alive!"

This is all well and good and as it should be. But while it is a certainty there is other life forms in the infinite vastness of space none of them seem to be anywhere near here. Thus for the present we've only got ourselves to play with.

That in mind, when we think of space what should we be thinking of?

Funny you should ask because I was contemplating this while jogging the other day (don't ask me how this popped into my head, as I have utterly no idea) and happen to now have the perfect answer.

Terra-forming.

Those familiar with science fiction may be familiar with this term but for those that aren't terraforming is the process of taking an uninhabitable environment, think Venus or Mercury or Mars here, and turning it into a place people and other Earth life can live freely in.

Normally this process is depicted by using huge machines. Picture an air-conditioner the size of a large city, except instead of cooling the air, it would take in available resources from the planet and turn it into air and perhaps water.

Now first of all we must here limit out discussion to planets that are first terrestrial, setting foot on a gas giant just isn't a happening thing, and second of sufficient mass hold an atmosphere of breathable air to it's surface and not simply vent it off into space.

Past these two initial requirements all other considerations are secondary and can be thought through and conquered with human ingenuity. However, back to the original premise of using ultra massive machinery to turn a planet habitable to humanity, I find this idea to have crippling and ultimately insurmountable problems.

The idea is fine for science fiction, but in reality not only do you have to keep all of these machines repaired and in working order but you also have to power them in some way shape of form. In either case this would be not only hugely expensive, but more importantly, on the scale that would be required completley unfeasible.

Honestly, I love to believe that we as people could do it but the fact is it isn't possible, or if we ignore this objection and assume that it could be done it would require such resources of man power, energy, and materials as to beggar the imagination.

Yet behold! The dream of terraforming can still be accomplished. It can even be accomplished by man, we're just going to need a bit of help. From what immensely powerful ally can mankind hope to draw aid you ask?

Bacteria.

Yes, bacteria, those wee little things that make you sick that you can't even see without the help of a microscope. Those things which live in the most severe, the most varied habitats in the world.

In the beginning the planet earth did not have an atmosphere of oxygen. Oxygen is thought to have come as the byproduct of certain elementary life forms which gave rise to progressively more complex life forms until we get to where we are now. The point being that we need to recreat this process on the planets we hope to live on one day, and if we were smart we'd start today.

I don't know how long it took to convert earth's atmosphere to having a significant portion of oxygen and all those other gases which make air but regardless, by human standards it took a very long time. Thus, if we want to take over a planet we need to begin the terraforming today. We need to round us up some hardy bacteria and shove them on a space pod and launch them into space. The pod should be shot at some planet we hope to inhabit one day and upon arrival disperse the bacteria in as wide an area as possible. The hardy bacteria would flourish converting toxic gases into breathable ones and replicating to make more bacteria to do the same without humanity having to lift a finger. Eventually an uninhabitable world becomes a human paradise and all would live happily ever after frolicking in a man/bacteria made Eden.

A sublimely simple solution if I do say so myself, and I do.