FREESPEAK
Derek Künsken says bioforming is our future
Derek Künsken tells us the future is all about bioforming. DN-eh?
science fiction talks about terraforming as the sort of basic assumption for humanity to leave the Earth. Sure, we’ll live in habitats for a while, but eventually places like Mars and possibly Venus will be terraformed, while Mercury and moons of the gas giants will have enclosed habitats with Earth-like conditions. We’ll make the places we go look like the place we came from.
I think our optimism is getting away from us, though. Even if we could import a lot of water to it, Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field as strong as the Earth’s, so radiation will always be a problem; radiation that will strip away hydrogen (and therefore water) constantly. Venus has the same problem and shares another issue with Mars: neither planet has detectable plate tectonics. Water and plate tectonics are super-important in sustaining the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.
I’m not saying all this to be a pessimist. I just want to point out that there’s a limit to how habitable we can make Mars and Venus. The conclusion is the same (for different reasons) for Jovian moons like Europa or Ganymede, or Saturn’s moon Titan. They’re all super-cold and pretty exposed to radiation.
But what about changing ourselves? Frederik Pohl famously looked at this in his novel Man Plus, where humans were made into cyborgs to survive on Mars. I don’t know if I’d like cyborg tech for myself, but genetic engineering technology (look up CRISPR for lots of fun reading) allows for gene editing on a scale we’ve never had before. We can imagine taking qualities from other creatures and putting them into us.
For example, human cells already naturally repair some radiation damage in DNA. But some bacteria can survive huge amounts of radiation, like D. radiodurans. If human DNA repair were similarly strong, the range of human habitability would change, whether that was surviving on the surface of Mars, travelling through the solar system or living in orbital habitats.
In polar regions and the ocean depths, psychrophiles (Latin for “I love me some chill, baby”) live and metabolise and reproduce at temperatures as low as -200°C. The problem with humans is that chemical reactions and biochemistry are really temperature dependent. If you cool us too much, our proteins and fats stop being flexible. In theory, if you replaced every protein (we have about 60,000) in us with a protein that did the same job at a hundred degrees colder, you could dramatically increase the range of human habitability. Of course, those human frosties could never go anywhere as warm as the Earth, but that’s a trade-off.
What about other oceans? We tend to imagine The Jetsons as our future, but what if it’s more The Little Mermaid? We know of lots of aquatic mammals. Dolphins and whales and walruses are templates if we wanted to engineer ourselves to live in the sub-surface ocean of Europa. We’d need to rework our respiration too – gills would be de rigueur, but that’s just more bioengineering.
In theory, we could do the same kind of genetic engineering to adapt to heavy metal toxicities, extreme pressure, hypersalinity, and so on. The biggest problem is not making the changes, but the debugging process. Genomes are like computer programs, and software engineers spend years debugging complicated programs. We have 60,000 genes that all talk to each other, so the biggest part will be making sure that the working metabolic webs we’ve got are preserved.
We’ll probably need help from some AIs, but this may open up the stars.
“if you cool us too much, our proteins stop being flexible”