Scientists find desert moss 'that can survive on Mars'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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...
A plant would have to completely change how it operates, which is unlikely under selection processes.
If we should seed planet (and we shouldnt at this point, we are still pretty much clueless in so many things), at least with something that produces O2. But we shouldnt anyway, 1 bad mutation and we will have maybe cyanide or trifluorides in atmosphere instead on top of current challenges.
Is something that lives at +30C to -80C on Martian chemistry impossible?
Edit: you could first try to make a plant that thrives at the top of mount Everest and in Antarctica, and then add a significant amount of radiation, make it much colder, grow it in permanganate, and you might have something approaching survivability for Mars.
It’s not as simple as Matt Damon growing some potatoes fertilized with his poo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobanthus_quitensis
The peak of Everest doesn’t because there’s no exposed soil not because of low pressure.
Lack of oxygen on Mars precludes flowering plants but not every organism needs oxygen.
It absolutely is. The only way in which it might be slightly more hospitable is that the regolith is easier to bury roots into than rock.
> Moss can survive extremely low temperatures as long as it occasionally gets above freezing but it can’t grow on ice
Granted, though I doubt it can survive martian temperatures for long.
> Lack of oxygen on Mars precludes flowering plants but not every organism needs oxygen.
The almost complete lack of an atmosphere on Mars definitely prevents any multi-cellular Earth-like organism from developing and thriving there, though. It's not just that there is no oxygen, there isn't almost anything at all, atmospheric density is 20g/m^3 at ground level, compared to Earth's 1200g/m^3 at sea level, or about 400g/m^3 at the top of Everest.
And you also have to remember the extreme radiation and the toxic regolith, plus the complete lack of any easily extractable nutrients in the "soil", and the lack of any kind of humidity (as all water is frozen more or less at all times).
Temperature is similarly less problematic than you would assume. Daily temperatures can reach well over 20C near the equator. It gets really cold, but once an organism freezes going super cold doesn’t really do anything. Thus storing human sperm at minus 196C even though they clearly weren’t evolved to deal with such temperatures.
Lack of water is the major issue. So yes overall Mars is significantly worse for life but it’s surprisingly close.
Something like a transparent fridge fueled by a small nuclear reactor that would trigger a thermostat to grant a minimum temperature each night. This could hypothetically hold arctic plants for a while, maybe a lot of time being extra optimistic.
A problem would be to protect the reactor and windows to be damaged by sand but if you have nuclear energy you have a source of electricity. The production would be really low in any case, but... not impossible, just extremely difficult.
> In the case of Buellia frigida in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region, the growth rate may be as little as 1 cm per 1,000 years.
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/plants/lichen...
I know it's not very scientific, but that's sorta my feeling too, lets just start seeding Mars with a bunch of extremophile plants and bacteria and see if any of it takes.