A theoretical project could help to turn marginally habitable planets into rich environments capable of hosting microbes, a new paper argues. The project is reminiscent of a fictional machine called "the Genesis Device," which appeared in two 1980s "Star Trek" films, but the author told Space.com that the resemblance is mostly coincidental.
In the film "The Wrath of Khan" (1982), the Genesis Device was accidentally deployed and created a whole new planet in a time span of just days or weeks. The real-world device would be used to plant terrestrial lifeforms on an existing planet that has some of the ingredients of habitability, but not all of them.
An idea for a sort-of real-world version of that fictional device, called the Genesis project, is described in a new paper by Claudius Gros, a professor who studies complex system theory and simulated robotics at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany.
In the new paper, Gros argues that it would be possible to terraform planets (effectively make them more like Earth), using robotic probes that would carry terrestrial organisms and deposit them on the surface of the alien planet. However, the technology for such probes is not even in the design phase, making it uncertain when such a project could come to light.
"The Genesis project is about giving life [the chance] to evolve all by itself on other planets," said Gros in an e-mail to Space.com. "This process is robotic only in the sense that the initial seeds will be transported by robotic interstellar probes."
Read More:
http://www.isn-news.net/2016/09/could-star-trek-like-genesis-device.html
