Some of you may or may not be aware that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is investing heavily in genetic engineering with many goals in mind, one in particular being [url=http://motherboard.vice.com/read/darpas-new-biotech-unit-will-try-to-create-artificial-life-forms/]engineering completely new life forms[/url]. Not just any life forms, but life capable of terraforming Mars. [quote] The goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on. “For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay,” Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office said Monday at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference. As she said this, Jackson was pointing at an artist's rendering (shown above) of a terraformed Mars. “There are anywhere from 30 million to 30 billion organisms on this Earth. We use two right now for engineering biology,” she said. “I want to use any organism that has properties I want—I want to quickly map it and quickly engineer it. If you look at genome annotation software today, it’s not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes]. It’s built to look for an esoteric and interesting thing I can publish an academic paper on.”[/quote] They've created a program that doesn't just map genome's, it also seeks out actionable genes so they know the best way to engineer an organism. [quote]The goal is to essentially pick and choose the best genes from whatever form of life we want and to edit them into other forms of life to create something entirely new. This will probably first happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but it sounds as though the goal may be to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.[/quote] [spoiler] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/darpa-we-are-engineering-the-organisms-that-will-terraform-mars [/spoiler] Pretty crazy and awesome stuff. "Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life."  Alvin Toffler  Discuss.