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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Gene editing is probably the only way humans can colonize space. By adapting people to different gravities, air chemistry and pressure, radiation, etc., the need for life support equipment can be significantly reduced, and the quality of life of the colonists can be improved.

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Let me start by saying I'm not a biologist. However, it would seem prudent to think we are much much farther from doing most of what you said than doing terraforming at small levels when we just started editing embryos. Ostensibly the science doesn't even yet exist to do what you are describing whereas funding is the majority of the problem for terraforming at small levels.

Even small adjustments can make things better. One example is how melatonin levels in people vary based on what latitude they came from. Native Eskimos can digest different foods. The ability to synthesize vitamin C. Some people are more adapted to lower pressures (high altitude). Smaller body size can reduce life support requirements. It's endless.

I'm confused. Terraforming is 1000+ years away, if we are ever even able to do it at all. I'm unclear of what you mean by 'small levels' because either you are terraforming, or you aren't. You have to create an atmosphere, you need to create a planets worth or water, you need to inject a crap ton of CO2 into the atmosphere to create the material plants will use as building blocks, to create the O2. All of this is millennia away. We've been non stop injecting CO2 into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era, and that (while a bit of an issue today), isn't nearly enough carbon to begin to terraform a planet.

But for genetically modifying stuff, we're doing really well on that track. Most of the tech needed for designer babies is here. The issues with it aren't the tech existing, but our willingness to create massive numbers of defective offspring before we get a viable glow in the dark human. It's not the tech that's lacking, only our appetite for failed runs and a severe distaste for side-effects. But that's proven to work, CRISPR has already proven to be able to make glow in the dark pigs, so it's a matter of refinement. We don't have the slightest clue about terraforming. Just ideas at this point.

Iain Banks' Culture series (sci-fi novels) explores this subject in a way I enjoyed greatly.

"Biologically, the Culture's citizens have been genetically enhanced to live for centuries, and have modified mental control over their physiology, including the ability to introduce a variety of psychoactive drugs into their systems, change biological sex, or switch off pain at will. Culture technology is able to transform individuals into vastly different body forms but, for unclear reasons, the Culture standard form remains fairly close to human."

Why would you live on a planet with different gravity, atmosphere, etc when you can have a nice orbiting habitat adapted to human needs?

Turns out space stations are not the most easily expanded spaces to accommodate growing populations.

That is true, but not really useful. There are only a few planets that we can inhabit. Not enough energy (sunlight) reaches Saturn to make it a useful planet even if you can stand the gravity.

In short if we want to expand beyond at best 3 planets we need a new solar system. That means we need humans able to make the several thousand year journey in a generation ship to a different star.

I suppose we could also take an earth sized chunk out of Saturn and put it into earth orbit. A generation ship to a different star seems more feasible to me.

There is a lot of stuff floating around the solar system (asteroids, small moons) that can be mined. We need to automate that process and that of habitat construction, then the Asteroid Belt could hold 7,500 trillion people, if thoroughly reshaped.

Asteroids can also serve as giant "yachts" to move around the solar system. Find one in the right orbit, land on it, and hitch a ride. You've got all the radiation shielding needed, plus plenty of raw materials to build out the "spaceship".

On the flip side, if we have a problem with racism now just on the basis of skin color/ethnicity/(culture), just imagine what sort of conflicts would arise once there are actual different human races. Even more so if they cannot reproduce with one another.

Life, uh, finds a way.

I finally registered an account just to show how much I appreciated the double entendre!

I agree with the others that this is a long way off. But just imagine, if 200 years from now, you could grow a space-worthy carapace overnight, with attachments for gear. And organs that transform a dense solid into maneuvering gas and oxygenated blood. In fact, we could just do away with the whole breathing thing, that is so unreliable and unhygienic.

> But just imagine, if 200 years from now, you could grow a space-worthy carapace overnight, with attachments for gear. And organs that transform a dense solid into maneuvering gas and oxygenated blood.

I would expect that to happen. It's not a weird approach, it's perfectly reasonable - biology, after all, is technology. A very advanced nanotech that we did not engineer and we don't control yet, but technology nonetheless. Humans are not bound to deal only with metals, plastics and electricity forever.

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