Holy shit, the Earth is dying! Let’s get the fuck out of here!

Easier said than done, of course. What might be helpful as we colonize the solar system are bio-spacesuits. From Liz Stinson’s Wired piece about MIT designing Neri Oxman, who’s been working on organic second skins:

“If you’re planning on extended interplanetary travel, you’re going to need more than a standard spacesuit. Sustaining human life on, say, Mercury or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, means battling the worst of conditions. ‘Crushing gravity, ammonius air, prolonged darkness and temperatures that would boil glass or freeze carbon dioxide,’ says Neri Oxman, a designer and professor at MIT’s Media Lab. Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it?

For a new speculative design project called Wanderers Oxman and her team of students partnered with 3D printing behemoth Stratasys and the computational design duo Deskriptiv to build four wearable skins that serve as bio-augmented space suits. Each is designed to battle a specific extreme environment by transforming elements found there into ones that can sustain human life. ‘Some are designed to photosynthesize, converting daylight into energy, others bio-mineralize to strengthen and augment human bone,’ Oxman explains. In doing so, they offer a wild glimpse of a future in which the barriers between biology and technology have fallen away.

Mushtari, designed for life on the moons of Jupiter, is an external digestive tract that fits around the stomach. Oxman designed the organ system to digest biomass, absorb nutrients and expel waste. Humans would be able to convert daylight into consumable sucrose via photosynthetic bacteria that flows through the translucent 3-D printed tracts.”