Space Potatoes: Developing Plants for Space Agriculture
Biotechnology might help us engineer an elite potato for long space journeys
The final frontier
The sky is not the limit; outer space is.
As a species, we’re taking the first tiny steps in exploring our nearby celestial neighborhood. We’ve set boots on moon ground, and have alighted helicopters on Mars. Robotic probes have ventured even further.
And so, some people dream of moon bases and Mars colonies. From there, who knows… Scientific outposts on Jovian moons? Mining operations in the asteroid belt? Generation ships to visit other stars?
Sadly, our imagination always runs into reality.
Space travel is not a walk in the park.
The human body — our cardiovascular system, for example — likes a decent gravity and dislikes too much radiation. Unfortunately, space travel — with current technology — takes away most of the former, and gives us plenty of the latter. To combat this, there are some ideas to use CRISPR gene-editing to ‘build’ better astronauts or enhance humans to become true Martians.
But that’s far from everything we need to worry about as we venture into outer space. Bacterial hitchhikers might turn…
