An unspoken rule among party-goers is that anyone left at the end of the night helps to clean up a little, so naturally everybody tries to leave early to avoid dealing with the mess. Well what if we could apply that same lack of accountability to Earth? If we never solve the energy crisis and don't get a handle on greenhouses gases, it may be possible in the future to just leave for another planet. Surely we won't screw that one up, right?

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Second planet's a charm!

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Apparently, a bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans is going to help us along the way.

What? How?

Deinococcus radiodurans, which is nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium" is famous for its ability to not die. It shrugs off an astronomical amount of radioactivity, up to 1.5 million Rads, which is equivalent to 1.5 million Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or 3,000 times more radiation than it takes to kill a human. It's also about 750,000 times more than the maximum daily measured radiation on Mars. See where we're going with this?



How many of these do we have to eat to gain their powers?

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You may know that "terraforming" is the process of making another planet, like Mars, more Earth-like before we even get there. Obviously that's difficult if not impossible if the work involves millions of humans in bulky suits and hundreds of ships taking them back and forth. But microbes like Deinococcus radiodurans open up the possibility of sending a bunch of them spilling out onto the Martian surface and letting them do the work for us. For instance, even if Mars had our atmosphere, we couldn't grow plants there because the soil is toxic. But we have decoded the genome of Deinococcus radiodurans, and therefore could one day engineer a version that would change the composition of the Martian soil, making it plant-friendly.