DARPA wants to be able to terraform Earth and Mars and whatever other sphere it chooses, editing genes in organisms which will allow for the altering of environments, the healing and fine-tuning of atmospheres. Very useful, provided nothing goes wrong. From Jason Koebler at Vice Motherboard:

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 to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in the future.

The utility of having such a capability is pretty astounding: Jackson threw out goals of eradicating vector-borne illnesses, which obviously sounds lovely and utopian. But perhaps more interesting is DARPA’s plan to use specifically engineered organisms to help repair environmental damage. [Deputy Director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office Alicia] Jackson said that after a natural or man-made disaster, it’d be possible to engineer new types of extremophile organisms capable of surviving in a scarred wasteland. As those organisms photosynthesized and thrived, it would naturally bring that environment back to health, she said.

And that’s where terraforming Mars comes in.•