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#1 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-26 16:14:41
SF writer, Greg Bear (http://www.gregbear.com/blog/display.cfm?id=982), pointed me out that we need viruses - the point is that we use some parts (eg capsid) of REV (retrovirus which is in our DNA) in some essential mechanisms, so we can't replace it to something neutral.
But over this millions of years, this capsids have been optimized for our purposes. Maybe it's good point for viruses to begin evolution, but there is still a long way, counted in thousands-millions of years. Viruses for evolution requires friendly environment - cells. Ours has quite good protection, much better then when viruses evolved last time.
We can also think about transforming only eg human, and use original bacterial flora, which could be compatible (after teaching the immune system)?
I've received a long letter from Steve Winter. One of many things he mentioned was that " there was a study where a group fed some bacteria chiral food, and it eventually evolved the ability to eat the food".
It's large problem, but I think they should have much more problems with evolution of interactions (like aggressiveness) with chiral organism, and in supported by us chiral ecosystem, they should be dominated...
And they usually die with the carrier.
But the largest benefit from chiral life are viruses - let's say that we can manage with microorganisms, but elimination of viruses looks hopeless
http://virology.wordpress.com/
And the lack of them should slow down the evolution of bacterias, making the creation of stable ecosystem easier.
What are the costs of such project?
The most of the cost is to transform a few cells of each needed specie - I think that required technology should be standard in a few dozens of years.
Then we have to replace seeds for a few fields, clone some cattle ... and humans for adoption...
The replacement process can be very slow.
And the income ... HEALTH ... crop production ... pests ... maybe to be or not to be for natural Martian life until terraforming
#2 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-18 05:22:12
The problem is not with larg plants, but with all microrganisms...
About recessive genes - that could be not enough.
We may look for the solution in their introns - there should be some ancient mechanisms...
Anyway - the less parasites, the larger chance of success...
I have a serious discussion about this topic on
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/show … hp?t=27078
#3 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-16 06:20:24
The required tool should be available in a few dozens of years (chiral life)
Let's focus on a possibility of eliminating some parasite...
What would it result in?
Here is the list of general parasites positive effect, I can think of...
Please expand it and discuss...
1. Population control - when the density of some organisms is growing, it's easier for its parasites to expand - this factor influence stability of the ecosystem.
The question is if without it, some specie could dominate its ecological niche?
Maybe it could be set that it would be automatically controlled by concurrency, food access,...?
Maybe such domination wouldn't be so bad?
Maybe without this control factor, ecosystem would achieve different point, which would be stable?
2. Stress increase - the elimination of weak organisms.
It improve selection, required to evolution. But after a few billions of years, a few thousand shouldn't be so important...
If it would be planned well, evolution shouldn't throw it out from the stable point...
Removing of weak organisms, makes place for new too, which probable would have positive influence on the effectiveness of ecosystem, but needs some energy to grow earlier.
So the removing of the parasite should make the population older, but I think that it wouldn't affect the effectiveness much...?
3. Stress increase - elimination of weak cells
Small amount of radiation can have positive results, perhaps because it helps to remove damaged (weaken) cells, thanks of what there should be smaller probability of cancer...
Summarizing - cells are being more frequent replaced - it's energetic cost, but thanks of it, organism should be more healthy and live longer...
So reduction of this stress among animals looks positive from our point of view (it increase selection of organisms too), but about people - energy isn't a priority - we should choose it as optimal as possible...
There should be many ways of replacing stress from infections.
We could eg use radiation - I think we should study this technique precisely.
I was thinking about using our immune system - teach him a very delicate autoimmune reaction, but it could be very dangerous.
Anyway we would have to give immune system something to do - living in the sterile environment can lead to autoimmune diseases (hygiene hypothesis).
#4 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-15 12:44:22
I have to add that I thought mainly about eliminating (micro mainly) organisms that practically only parasitize, not contributing anything positive into the ecosystem, like eg viruses, locust ...
We couldn't restrict to system plants + us... soil have to be fertilized, fragments has to be decomposed, some reactions has to be made, plants has to be pollinate, etc, etc ...
We need trees too (oxygen), we have different environments, specifications of places...
Whereas most of the higher organisms in this moment, instead of farm animals, are rather keepsake of nature, they rather don't influence on our ecosystem...
The question eg is, if we can manage with that viruses helps control some populations...
#5 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-15 09:43:16
It's extremaly difficult to make corrections like "just exchange Fe with Mg" - it require almost completely new bichemical cycles, and adjust them to work perfecly... for a few hundret years we will base on Earth organisms.
But maybe we have on Earth placec with similar light spectrum like on Mars, or we could try to find these ancient organisms...
The reason of this thread was a bit different... 
Any life we want to take there ... the best would be if it wouldn't be contaminated with unwanted things like viuses, microorganisms, etc. because they would reduce effectiveness of ecosystem we need...
#6 Re: Terraformation » Harmony-the way to increase effectiveness of ecosystem » 2007-06-15 07:11:45
If we look at our ecosystem - it's one huge domestic war - organisms uses most of energy on competition, fight...
It's mainly energy from the cleanest, never ending source - the sun.
In the times of threat of energy crisis, overpopulation, one of our hope could be increasing the effectiveness of this changing solar energy into needed sugars, proteins.
The other thing is that we are geting closer to the concept of creating completely new ecosystems, like on Mars, where this effectiveness of development of ecosystem is essential for the whole project.
I would like to initiate a discussion about the possibility of such increase of effectiveness: is it possible and how much we could increase it?
One way I see to do it, is by selection of organisms - to create a very precise ecosystem, in which organisms almost haven't opposite interests.
We could replace some organisms with handicapped ones by eg removing sequences coding some proteins too(evolution couldn't repair it quickly) .
The tool we could use to remove some organisms, could be chiral life:
http://virology.wordpress.com/
Let say, we have this Noe's ark to select, modify ...
Let's think if it would be possible to such a stable, more effective ecosystem?
How to make it make it, so the proportion of organisms would be automatically keep on the appropriate levels?
So that evolution, climate differences wouldn't spoil everything...?[/url]
#7 Re: Terraformation » Animals on a terraformed Mars - what should we populate Mars with? » 2007-06-15 07:06:54
My thought is that other than bacteria or lichens or a few select virus.
Virus have to have something to live at...:)
We have to start with the bottom of chin food - propably unicellural, organisms, which are able to photosythesis...
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