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August 7, 2006
Part XII: Astrobiology
Robotic Lunar Ecopoesis Test Bed
Paul Todd
Space Hardware Optimization Technology, Inc.
30 min. (slideshow requires QCShow Player)
Audio only (mp3 format)
View as a webpage (quicktime, real player) (notes)
"This is home. This is where we start again."
— Hiroko Ai,
in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
Panspermia is a notion fostered in its modern form by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. In this hypothesis, life did not originate on Earth but rather was seeded here by impacting comets or asteroids.
Although Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's ideas have been poorly received by the scientific community, we may be on the verge of enabling their ideas, albeit in reverse. We are almost certainly going to take life to Mars, if it doesn't already exist there.
In last week's lecture, Chris McKay spoke of the possibility of our purposefully recreating a Mars capable of sustaining the life that independently evolved on Mars, if it ever existed, rebuilding the dead world that Mars is now into something flourishing with a second, independent genesis of life.
But there is another possibility of much greater probability: life never evolved on Mars. Rather we are going to take it there for the first time and make Mars a living planet, terraforming it into an Earth-like planet.
Ecopoesis is the process of creating conditions capable of autonomously evolving a self-sustaining ecosystem on another planet. At the moment, we only have the vaguest of ideas on how to accomplish this, but if we're ever going to do it, it's going to be first done on Mars.
To perform ecopoesis, we're going to need practice. Quite a lot of practice, in fact. In this week's lecture, Paul Todd describes work that his company, Space Hardware Optimization Technology, Inc., is performing to construct Mars simulators.
The intent of this work, which is funded by NASA's Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC), is to create commercial systems that will allow other laboratories to readily engage in ecopoeisis research, both in the lab and on the Moon.
Beyond the mechanics, Paul also discusses at some length the candidate "pioneer" organism(s) with which we will likely seed Mars. Although there are a panoply of species on Earth which are capable of surviving one or two aspects of the Martian environment, almost none can survive all of the conditions that the planet presents, other than perhaps the cyanobacteria. By consensus of current best guesses, these are organisms that will most probably form the basis of the new ecosystem we will attempt to build.
— Wirt Atmar
About the Speaker
Prior to joining SHOT as chief scientist three years ago, Dr. Paul Todd served as, in chronological order, Lecturer in the Department of Physics, University of California, Professor of Biophysics at Penn State University (20 years) where he also served as chairman of the graduate program in genetics, founding director of Philadelphia’s Bioprocessing and Pharmaceutical Research Center (a NASA Center of Excellence in Microgravity Research), Physicist, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Research Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado (10 years) where he also served as Associate Director of BioServe Space Technologies (a NASA Center for Space Commercialization).
He received his education at Bowdoin College, Harvard University, MIT, University of Rochester and University of California. He co-edited eight books or proceedings in the fields of bioprocessing and of space research and recently co-authored a textbook in bioprocess engineering (bioseparations).
He was founding chairman of USRA Science Working Group in Microgravity Biotechnology, served on DOE’s Health and Environmental Research Advisory Committee and chaired the Microgravity Subcommittee of the NRC’s Space Applications Board. He is co-author of 290 scientific papers, co-inventor on five issued patents and co-investigator of microgravity experiments on more than 20 space shuttle missions in addition to experiments using drop tower, sounding rockets and low-gravity aircraft.
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