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No life on Mars? Whatever, we’ll just engineer our own Martian microbes from scratch

Whether there is or ever was microscopic microbial life on Mars is still debatable, but Earth scientists are going to make sure there’s life up there one way or another, even if it means creating hearty Martian microbes ourselves, from scratch. Playing God is awesome.

Undergraduate researchers at Stanford and Brown Universities are at work creating what they call a “Hell Cell” — a synthetic microbe hardy enough to withstand the harsh conditions of space, as reported by Wired. They are using “biobricks,” or pre-packaged gene sequences from other environmentally durable organisms, called extremophiles, to create a multipurpose microbe that can mine minerals and perform other beneficial tasks on other planets. The students are part of the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) challenge, an annual competition where students use synthetic biology to create useful microorganisms. If you’d like to find out more about these indestructible cells that may or may not make the plot of Red Planet a reality, Stanford-Brown’s iGEM page has all the recombinant information you could want.

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    YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES
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    I think it would be funny if this life evolved into intelligent life and we died out so the intelligent designer theory...
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