Recent developments in Synthetic Biology brings terraforming closer to the realm of the possible. But it turns out someone didn’t wait… Darwin had a secret experiment that not many people know about.
Ascension Island and the first and only terraforming experiment
At the end of his 5 year mission exploring new worlds and studying their fauna and flora, Darwin stopped at Ascension Island. A small volcanic island 1600km from Africa and 2250km off the coast of South America.
At the time it was just a big rock, bright red volcanic cones and rugged black lava. Not much else… until Darwin, his botanist friend Hooker and the Royal Navy came up with the idea of transforming it into a green Oasis.
The idea was simple yet elaborate. Lets ship trees from all over the world and put them on top of the highest peak. They will collect mist and enable other things to grow.
And you know what? It worked! Ascension is now the strangest island where an artificial ecosystem was implanted with trees and plants that did not evolve to live together.
You can read more about this crazy story on the BBC website.
Terraforming & Synthetic Biology
The first step of terraforming, is called ecopoiesis and consists in using microbial life to change a candidate planet’s atmosphere chemistry, to enrich it in 02 and N2, as well as warming it up through green house gases if necessary.
Synthetic Biology could bring a lot by stepping out of its comfort zone and start developing tools to engineer “unusual” chassis. A number of extremophiles could be interesting candidate for ecopoiesis, including the Cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis, Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans, or Deinococcus Radiodurans which all show a variety of interesting metabolisms and properties ranging from dessication to ionizing resistance.
Will Synthetic Biology help? Most likely. In the context of space exploration, Synthetic Biology has already caught the eyes of NASA Ames which is now actively doing research in the field: “Synthetic biology in space represents a new challenge, the challenge of designing organisms to perform reliable functions that an astronaut may one day depend on”.
Ready to write a grant application? 
Read more:
- Fascinating BBC article on Darwin’s experiment on the Ascension Island
- Check out NASA Ames Synthetic Biology Initiative
- Terraforming on Wikipedia
