Are we the new Martians? No, we
August 1st, 2001
Futurists make their forecasts Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
They’re coming back from the future, 1,000 pilgrims, heads swimming with visions of the world to come. Reading and writing have vanished. Hospitals have “smart beds” that control your medications. We’re fat and consumed with “cyber road rage,” but we’ve turned a corner in our civilization. We’ve colonized Mars. The future took place for three days, through Tuesday at the Hilton in Minneapolis. We’re talking about the annual conference of the World Future Society, which drew 1,000 people, mostly from the United States and Canada but also from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Germany.
June 15th, 2001
Saving the Planet
Scientists Say Adjusting Earth’s Path Could Rescue It From the Dying Sun. “We started thinking that if you could move the Earth, you could buy some time,” says Don Korycansky, lead author of a recent paper in Astrophysics and Space Science and a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He and two other scientists propose gradually shifting Earth’s orbit to keep pace with the expansion of the sun.
June 1st, 2001
Jellyplants on Mars
The first colonists on Mars probably won’t be humans. More likely, they’ll be plants. And the prototypes of these leafy pioneers are under development right now. As part of a proposed mission that could put plants on Mars as soon as 2007, University of Florida professor Rob Ferl is bioengineering tiny mustard plants. He’s not altering these plants so that they can adapt more easily to Martian conditions. Instead, he’s adding reporter genes: part plant, part glowing jellyfish — so that these diminutive explorers can send messages back to Earth about how they are faring on another planet.
May 8th, 2001
Roses for the Red Planet
It’s been nearly 25 years since NASA sent biological experiments to Mars. Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, thinks it’s time to try again. McKay helped organize a NASA conference last year on terraforming — that is, what it might take to make Mars fit for human habitation. In a presentation at the conference, McKay proposed an intriguing experiment.
April 26th, 2001
Genetically Modified Earth Plants Will Glow From Mars University of Florida
In what reads like a story from a 1950s science fiction magazine, a team of University of Florida scientists has genetically modified a tiny plant to send reports back from Mars in a most unworldly way: by emitting an eerie, fluorescent glow. If all goes as planned, 10 varieties of the plant could be on their way to the Red Planet as part of a $300 million mission scheduled for 2007. The plant experiment, which is funded by $290,000 from NASA’s Human Exploration and Development in Space program, may be a first step toward making Mars habitable for humans, said Rob Ferl, assistant director of the Biotechnology Program at UF
April 19th, 2001
Terraform 1 (through April 19, 2001) Henry Art Gallery
The term Terraform refers to a world that has been made habitable or earthlike, supporting life where none previously existed. The inspiration for this work was two-fold: to create an experiential virtual space within the walls of a traditional gallery and to bring together a group of artists from diverse backgrounds and at varying stages of their careers to envision and construct it.
February 17th, 2001
How Man has left his mark on the Earth The Daily Telegraph
THE dominance of Man over nature is highlighted today in an extraordinary new series of satellite maps that reveal how one half of the Earth carries the “ecological footprint” of humanity. A vast swathe of pink – once the colour used to mark the British Empire but now chosen to show land that has been ploughed up or paved over – stretches across 24 per cent of all available land in the world. Another 26 per cent is pasture for livestock. The scientists who created the map from remote sensing satellites said yesterday that humans had become a force of nature “comparable to volcanoes or to cyclical variation in the Earth’s orbit”.
February 5th, 2001
Planet Earth on the move
Mankind will soon have the ability to move the Earth into a new orbit, say a team of astronomers. The planetary manoeuvre may more than double the time life can survive on our planet, they believe. Using the well-understood “gravitational sling shot” technique that has been employed to send space probes to the outer planets, the researchers now think a large asteroid could be used to reposition the Earth to maintain a benign global climate. It is an “alarmingly simple” technique, the astronomers say. It could ensure humanity’s survival and even allow our descendants to alter our Solar System to move moons and planets to make new Earths.
February 18th, 2000
Need Shelter on Mars? Grow Trees, Scientist Says
Trees that can grow their own protective greenhouses and computers smart enough to figure out things for themselves are some of the tools that will help future space explorers settle Mars, scientists predicted on Friday.