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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Headline's a little clickbaity as the moss wouldn't be able to reproduce. There was a better article on this topic a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40781266

The biggest obstacle is probably how scarce water is on Mars. Like this desert moss might survive for a while but without water it won't be able to reproduce and spread. The team in the link above is considering genetically engineering an organism to absorb water from the atmosphere but even then it is just trace amounts.

Life requires water to survive and grow, doesn't seem like you can have a living organism terraform Mars for you unless you've introduced a ton of water through other means.

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> Life requires water to survive and grow, doesn't seem like you can have a living organism terraform Mars for you unless you've introduced a ton of water through other means.

This is the example I constantly refer to about how slow progress has been with probes and rovers, and why we really need feet on the ground. Mars is surprisingly relatively moist. The topsoil is about 2% water by mass! [1] To use the really confused metrics from the article - that's a liter of water per cubic foot of soil! The even more enticing thing is what's below? It's strongly suggestive that it may be even more moist below.

Back to the slowness - this was only discovered in 2013! It's one of the very few things that "The Martian" got accidentally wrong. The book was written before this discovery was made, and most people thought the soil was as barren and dry as it looks. It's not!

[1] - https://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-r...

Does that mean the dust wouldn't be as toxic / sharp and is less likely to cause massive damage to things, especially if an environment were partially buried?

A quick search shows that it's typically 20-30%. 2% sounds extremely exciting then!

Let’s adjust the orbits of comets to collide with Mars and focus large solar mirrors at Lagrange points to reflect light to heat the planet.

Antarctica has yielded plenty of Mars rocks, bits of Mars that were blasted off one planet by a collision to eventually land on earth. I think that dropping millions/billions more comets onto Mars might come back to haunt us.

That would depend on the angle of attack and impact speed, wouldn't it?

At that rate we should just strap boosters to Mars and bring it to Earth's orbit

ENOBUDGET Unable to allocate sufficient funding

Request issued for additional platinum-iridium rich asteroids to be delivered to Earth orbit.

ENETUNREACH: The Chinorussese Solar Federation is blockading platinum rich asteroids until they get back war criminal and musician Vladimir the handyman, accused of using a wrench to knock a satellite of out orbit back onto Earth

It might not work for greening mars johnny-appleseed style, but it would be nice to have plants that can survive for some time if the greenhouse they are in has a technical issue.

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