How to Terraform Mars — Erika DeBenedictis

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How to Terraform Mars — Erika DeBenedictis of Pioneer Labs

Pioneer Labs has made its first microbe capable of growing in simulated Martian soil and making building materials.

Asimov Press and Niko McCarty

Sep 22, 2026

Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit research group in California, revealed today that they’ve engineered a “first” microbe that is able to live on Mars, using only nutrients found on the planet, and create building materials. They are saying this is the first ‘pioneer’ species needed to terraform the planet.

During my interview with CEO Erika DeBenedictis, I asked about the myriad bottlenecks to growing life on Mars. The planet has tons of water, for example, but only as ice. (So much water, in fact, that if you melted all of it, it would fill an ocean 100 feet deep across the entire planet!)

Similarly, we talked about the dirt. Martian regolith has salts, heavy metals, and perchlorates that are toxic to many organisms. Some microbes on Earth are able to break down these toxins, though, and get energy from doing it. Pioneer is engineering these organisms to make them better at eating toxins while adding nutrients back into the soil, which could possibly support plant life in the future.

My main takeaway from this interview is that biotechnology can be used to do so many things; not only for medicine, but also about bioremediation and protecting animal species and, yes, seeding life on other planets. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Timestamps

0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars
5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry
8:27 The five "pioneer species"
17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen
26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements
35:49 Starship
41:05 Why create a second biosphere?

Transcript

Erika: That is the ultimate win condition. If we succeed maximally at making the five organisms for Mars, we’ll have a complete set of organisms that you could just crash land onto Mars and they’ll just grow themselves and make the planet nice.

Niko: So today’s guest is Erika DeBenedictis. She’s co-founder and CEO of Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit research group that is engineering microbes to terraform Mars. And what we’re going to talk about today is why we need a second biosphere beyond Earth. So Erika, welcome.

Erika: Thank you.

Niko: And we’re here, of course, filming in the lab at Pioneer because you have an announcement.

Erika: Yeah, we’ve engineered the first microbe for Mars. It’s useful. You can take it to Mars and use it to help build a city. It’s safe. It can’t be invasive. And most excitingly, it’s a first step toward terraforming. It actually grows using the nutrients in Mars dirt. You don’t have to cart stuff from Earth to grow it. And there’s a lot of Mars dirt on Mars. And that’s what you need to actually make a biosphere at scale.

Niko: And you have this here, right?

Erika: I do. Yeah. So this is one of the microbes we engineered. So this is a C. necator that we then evolved to be better at using the nutrients in Martian regolith. And we’re using it to produce PHB bioplastics.

So bioplastics are a class of materials that we often interact with in everyday life. They make up everything from 3D printing filament to compostable cups. Many different materials with a lot of good properties fall into this class. And we can manufacture things in that class of material with this organism.

Niko: So you have some of the sample here, too, of what these microbes are actually making, right? So you’re growing them in a simulated Martian liquid, which has all the toxins and all the kind of nutrients we would expect to find on Mars. And then they make this. And I’m curious, why did you want them to make this? Why is this useful?

Erika: Yeah. So this is an example of raw bioplastic right after it comes out of the organism, but before you form it into its final form. I think the first application we’re excited about is building astronaut houses with it. So you can make plastic liner that would contain the pressure that you need to breathe inside, and you can also use it to make panels to hold up your house.

And bioplastic is cool because microbes on Earth often make bioplastics for the same reason that we put on weight if we eat too many donuts. It’s a waste product and it’s a result of having too much carbon that they have to get rid of.

So unlike many other bioproducts that it’s an enormous amount of energy for the organism to make it and if it can figure out how to evolve away from making it or something, unlike those bioproducts, making bioplastic is the thing they do by default when they’re stressed, which is kind of how they’ll be on Mars.

Niko: And so you chose something that they could make without evolving away or breaking the function.

Erika: Exactly. And indeed, if we take these organisms to Mars and we continue to grow them, they’ll evolve to get better, not worse. And that’s important because you don’t want to take something to Mars and rely on the bioprocess and then have it break.

Niko: And this is maybe speculative, but let’s say you send microbes to Mars and they’re making bioplastics on the surface. How do you think about shaping this now into an actual dome that you can now populate with other things?

Erika: Yeah. And this is why I say this is right what comes out of the organism. This is just the fat on their hips, right? It is straight up extracted, and you get this molecule that you would then need to process with equipment that you would have to bring from Earth to form it into useful actual materials.

And the equipment required to do this processing is something we’re trying to minimize. So we’ve tried to make a first organism that is useful and that would require some processing equipment, but hopefully not too much. And we’ve actually completely enumerated how many boxes of equipment would you need to bring to Mars to do all of the processing and 3D printing and stuff like that to use this material. And we’ve actually gone through the full exercise of full TEA (techno-economic analysis) of how much weight do I need to bring to Mars to actually use this stuff?

Niko: So your vision for terraforming is microbes plus robots working together where the microbes are doing the biochemistry needed to create the material. One thing I’m interested in is why C. necator. It is kind of a strange microbe.

Erika: C. necator. Yeah.

Niko: I’ve seen papers with that being used. But again, you’re actually trying to get this thing to work in a very weird medium.

Erika: That’s right.

Niko: And so, how did you actually do the experiment of creating this? What is in the medium? Were you just putting a bunch of microbes in it and then doing evolution to figure out what could even survive? And then you have to engineer that to make bioplastic.

Erika: What’s kind of funny about this announcement, we’re really proud that we have made the first microbe for Mars. But the making of the microbe was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to choose which microbe and how to correctly simulate Mars so that we could make it better. And once we got that figured out, doing the evolution for many months, that was easy, right?

Niko: So how do you simulate Mars?

Erika: Yeah, so we’ve never brought Mars dirt back to Earth. Instead, what we have is we have beautiful rover data from multiple rovers that have really nicely engineered hardware for scooping up a little Mars dirt on Mars, adding water and then taking chemical measurements just on site. And so we have a good idea, actually, and really nice measurements of what’s in the dirt on Mars in multiple locations.

And from that, what we did was we created a defined media that accurately simulates what happens when you add Mars dirt and water and what the chemistry is of that mixture.

And this is a little bit different than how scientists have used what they call regolith simulants or Mars dirt simulants before. So people have had Mars dirt simulants for a long time, but they’re mostly designed to help you test your rover tires. So people find rocks on Earth that are roughly the same bulk mineral properties. They grind them up to the right dust size and then they’ll send it to you in a little sample and you can test your rover tires. But they’re...

Niko: You have some of that dirt here, right?

Erika: I do. So these are some samples of regolith simulant from Space Resources Technology. This is one that’s designed to mimic the dirt at the Curiosity rover landing site. And this is not under armed guard because this is not from Mars. This is just Earth rocks ground up. And this does a good job at allowing you to start doing tests mostly of mechanical stuff.

But this is not a sufficiently high fidelity simulation of the chemistry and what would matter for biology, especially both the nutrients that are in Mars dirt and the toxins. And so we created a defined media recipe that accurately simulates those things.

And that was what we used to take a bunch of terrestrial microbes, including C. necator. Yeah, it’s not E. coli. It’s not as famous as E. coli, but it’s often used in terrestrial biomanufacturing in part because, as organisms go, it’s kind of a generalist. It’s reasonably good at accepting unusual feedstocks and making use of them, which is exactly the task here.

Niko: So just to clarify, you have a microbe that uses Martian nutrients to make a material because in your mind, the first step to terraforming Mars is not to terraform the whole planet. It’s to make a mini greenhouse that we can fill with oxygen and then put microbes in there.

Walk me through the actual steps. You mentioned this is the first microbe for Mars. I think me naively, six months ago, I would have thought, oh, it’s just going to be one microbe that we send to Mars and it’s going to terraform the planet and grow and do everything. But your roadmap at Pioneer is actually a series of microbes that do different things.

Erika: Absolutely. So think about Earth. We don’t just have one microbe, right? Nature is really good at this task of taking a harsh environment that sucks and is sterile — think post forest fire or volcano, something like that — and transforming it into a complex ecosystem that has lots of different organisms in it, including not just one microbe, but thousands of microbes, even just in a gram of dirt on Earth.

And so Pioneer Labs, the name comes from this idea of creating the pioneer species that allow that ecological succession to take place where you begin with this sterile environment that’s mostly rock or, in the case of Mars, rock dust. That’s what the dirt is on Mars. It’s just sterile rock dust. And then you have to convert that material step by step into something that can support a wider variety of life, one pioneer species at a time.

So a pioneer species is something that comes in and can grow in a harsh environment and makes it easier for the organisms that come after it by adding nutrients to the soil or breaking up big pieces of rock into little pieces of gravel that then plants can grow in. And so our goal as an organization is to figure out what is the smallest number of these pioneer species we actually need so that we can go to Mars and step by step make it more habitable.

Niko: OK, so this is the first microbe for Mars. I’m curious, what is the full process that you envision? So you’re going to send this thing to Mars with robots and other people will build the robots probably, right? You’re just kind of providing the biological option. What is next? What is microbe two and three and four and five? And when do we have plants growing on Mars?

Erika: Yeah, so the goal is to get to a scalable way to make arable land where you could grow plants that make oxygen and food.

Working backward, plants need a warm environment that has enough liquid water to grow. And so in the short term, you need to make really, really simple enclosures. Could be as simple as basically a plastic bag, something that’s transparent so it lets light through, but it holds in just a little bit of that pressure so that your water doesn’t all evaporate immediately.

And we think we could make such really simple greenhouses with the microbe that makes bioplastic, which bioplastic has really good tensile strength so it can hold in the pressure, combined with a second organism that can make a transparent material. And there’s a bunch of options for that and that’s what we’re working on now, is what is the correct choice for making big sheets of transparent material on Mars that, again, requires very little processing. The more robots, the more expensive it’ll be. And ideally can be done super scalably and entirely, again, using Mars dirt, water and air. You don’t want to ship stuff from Earth.

So the plants, they need an environment to grow in and then they need good dirt. So the dirt on Mars has a toxin in it called perchlorate. And fortunately, there’s a little bit of perchlorate on Earth. It happens in really small quantities in high altitude deserts. It is produced when UV radiation hits sand. And this is why Mars has a ton of it and we have only a little bit of it.

And there are some microbes on Earth that can actually eat it. They degrade it. They get a little bit of energy out of it. And so we are now also working on microbes that you can add to Mars mud and they’ll just eat the toxin and add nutrients to the soil, add organic matter and nitrogen and so on.

And so altogether, tensile strength materials, transparent materials, get rid of the toxin and make the dirt nutritious. Those are the first four. And then the fifth is a photosynthetic thing that can grow in that environment and create oxygen and food.

Niko: Why not just ship a tarp, a clear... You keep saying it’s like a plastic bag. That’s not that heavy. Why don’t we just send the plastic bag, put in the perchlorate degrading microbe, put in a microbe that makes oxygen. Boom, terraform dome, right? Why do we need all five microbes?

Erika: We may not. So I think the fastest way to dome off a local area probably is to manufacture something on Earth and ship it there. I think the question of scale is always the thing that the biology is really good at.

So yes, totally. You might be able to manufacture a structure and send it to Mars and live in it. If you want to manufacture a bigger structure, then suddenly it starts becoming an attractive option to use biology to convert local materials into that larger structure.

Niko: You could also have a rover that’s setting up domes.

Erika: Absolutely. And as a concrete example, so the first microbe we engineered, we’ve done the full TEA to figure out: is this actually useful? Is it better to send that microbe to Mars and use that microbe to manufacture houses out of local materials? And is that better than just sending the materials from Earth and not bothering with any of that?

And the answer is yes, it is better. But the crossover point takes a couple years. So you have to send a bunch of infrastructure to Mars and it takes several years of that infrastructure cranking out product for it to justify its mass.

But that is fundamentally the thing, which is: where is the opportunity to use the fact that biology can convert awful toxic dirt on site into houses? When does that become useful? And it is useful in this scenario, exactly this scenario where Mars is far away, shipping stuff is expensive. And if we’re setting up shop, we will massively benefit from being able to manufacture things on site without being worried that our shipment of bioplastic from Earth is going to blow up or get delayed.

Niko: Do you think it would ever be possible to find the right combination of microbes? No equipment, no robots, just microbes and just put them on a light sail and send them to Mars and have life on Mars? Would they survive?

Niko: But they need robotics. They need bioreactors.

Erika: I think this is the question. I mentioned we’re trying to strip out as many of these human processes as possible, that each abiotic process is itself a bottleneck that requires equipment that you would send to Mars, equipment that could break, equipment that if you want to do that process over the whole planet, you have to send many copies of that equipment. And so this is the outstanding question, is how many of those robots can we get rid of?

I think more realistically, the path that seems eminently doable from an engineering perspective, but more expensive and requiring some robotics, does involve maintaining some of these processes that have these abiotic choke points, which in some ways is also a feature, right? Because I think it is its own different and scary prospect to have a fully biological system that doesn’t need human intervention and that can self propagate indefinitely.

And so maybe we like it that we need a little bit of robotics. We’re still important. We still have some control and we’ll see how the engineering pans out.

Niko: And you’re mentioning things like liquid water. You’re mentioning UV radiation, intense radiation, toxins in the dirt. And so I want to talk about some of the bottlenecks of growing life on Mars, because I think that, me as an engineer, that always helps me understand, what are we actually engineering for?

So I guess the first question here is how do we get water on Mars? And how do you ensure that your payload lands near where that water is? Right. If we’re not shipping water because it’s so heavy, how are you solving that problem?

Erika: Yeah. So I think it’s a super common misconception that Mars doesn’t have water. So 3.7 billion years ago, Mars and Earth were little twinsies. So both freshly formed planets both had liquid water. Following that, their paths diverged. So Mars was a little bit smaller. As a result, it cooled faster. Its magnetic field stopped, its core stopped convecting. And so its magnetic field turned off.

Something else must have also happened because we can’t figure out where Mars’s atmosphere went. We can’t fully account for it. But one way or another, Mars lost a lot of its atmosphere. Today it has sub 1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure, basically all CO2. And it’s really cold because what atmospheres do is they’re little blankets for planets.

And what happened to all of its water is that its water is now ice. So Mars actually has a ton of water. If you melted all of Mars’ water and distributed it evenly over the planet, you would get an ocean 100 feet deep.

And much of that water is permafrost in the northern hemisphere, so if you land kind of anywhere that’s mid northern latitude on Mars, it’s a really thin layer of dirt on top of basically a glacier that is permafrost. And so in that sense, Mars looks like a desert. It looks like the Atacama Desert, but actually it’s kind of more like Alaska. And that means the water is actually really easy to access.

You can use a type of well that people use in Greenland where you start with some water, you heat it up and you just pump it into the ground and use the heat that you can dump into the ground with the water as a way to melt more and then you suck it back up. And so you can actually get water out of Mars super easily.

Niko: So there are also people working on extremely potent greenhouse gases, right? And the idea is that they would take some of this and ship it to Mars and heat the planet by basically capturing more energy.

If you read the documents that Pioneer Labs has put out, which I’ll put in the description, that would take 30 years, people think, to heat the planet by 30 degrees Celsius. So do you just not want to wait 30 years? Doesn’t that seem like an easier thing, to ship greenhouse gases to Mars and heat the planet, wait a few decades and then start shipping microbes?

Erika: One could. Mars is too cold. There’s a bunch of different ways, proposals for how to heat it up. One proposal is this idea that perhaps we could manufacture something that you could sprinkle in the atmosphere that might be little bits of glitter that basically reflect heat radiation back toward the surface.

And yeah, the numbers look shockingly good for making another planet. So in 30 years for the cost of the U.S. interstate highway system, you could heat Mars up to liquid water compatible levels, which is amazing because then we could have another planet.

The downside being you have to convince a government to spend a couple billion dollars a year doing this for 30 years. And if you stop, it goes back to normal. And also you do have to continue to do it indefinitely or else again, the glitter settles out and then it cools back down.

Another option is to use solar sails. Reflect Orbital is a company that is deploying solar sails in orbit that would reflect light onto the ground. And you could use that also to... If Mars is too cold, just add more sunlight energy and thus heat it up. But this approach has a similar order of magnitude math, where you would have to spend a lot of money and just practically speaking, scaling up that manufacturing would take quite a long time to approach the magnitude of sunlight needed to be reflected onto Mars to heat the whole planet.

And I think both of these are really cool and exciting possibilities that some combination of all of these methods could be used in the long term to heat up Mars, keep it warm and control its climate. But practically speaking, the thing that is so much easier to implement is something where you get an immediate benefit in a local area.

So with the engineered aerosols, you’d have to heat the whole planet for 30 years with a lot of money before any benefit is acquired. In contrast, if you greenhouse off a small area, you can go live in that area. That can be where you have the first human mission to Mars and you can just expand the area.

And so again, all of these techniques could be used. They’re complementary. But I think we keep returning to this fact that regardless of what additional techniques you use to heat the planet, it’s a really good idea to focus your efforts and money on a small local area in which you can get immediate benefit.

Niko: I’m just imagining a little bubble with a drill pumping boiling water down. It’s very strange to think about. And there would be microbes in there.

Erika: So another thing about greenhouses, if you literally just plop down a greenhouse above permafrost, water vapor will be released into the greenhouse. So you don’t even need the drill if you have a really simple greenhouse. All you need to do is heat up a glacier to get water out of it.

Niko: And nitrogen. So Earth is mostly nitrogen, lots of nitrogen in the atmosphere. And organisms need that to build proteins and other things. But Mars, the nitrogen, it’s 3% or something or less. So how do you solve that problem? Is there enough nitrogen on Mars to terraform the planet?

Erika: So actually, when we first started this... Mars was not the only option for a planetary body that maybe you could make a planetary scale biomass on. So we went through all the other planets that you might think of and we computed if you converted all the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and phosphorus and sulfur that’s on that planet into biomass, how much do you get? And is it a big number? And for Mars, it’s a really big number.

So yeah, there’s a ton of nitrogen on Mars. There is relatively little nitrogen relative to Earth in the atmosphere. So Earth is mostly nitrogen gas in the atmosphere. On Mars, the nitrogen gas comprises a very small fraction of what is already a very thin atmosphere. And where the nitrogen is instead: it’s already in the dirt.

So by Earth standards, Mars dirt is pre-fertilized. It has fixed nitrogen in it already as nitrate. And so in the short term, that’s what you use. You can put organisms in the dirt that do not need to fix nitrogen out of the gas and can use the nutrients that are already there.

Now, the problem is that on Earth we have denitrifying bacteria that take nitrogen and basically breathe it and they release nitrogen back out into the atmosphere. And so on Earth we have a whole nitrogen cycle where some bacteria, they take the nitrogen gas, they make it solid basically. Other bacteria, they take the solid nitrogen, they make it gas again and around and around we go.

And so the question is on Mars, does that loop still close? On one hand, denitrification, so making the gas again would be slower because there’d be more oxygen in the atmosphere because the proposed atmosphere and that sort of proposed composition of the greenhouses is mostly oxygen. Or it’s a much higher percent oxygen. And so that step is slower. Similarly, fixing the nitrogen once again would happen. It would just happen way slower.

And so together do those things close? And that is an outstanding scientific question that remains one of the things that could actually be a deal breaker for terraforming. If somehow those two edges of the cycle don’t balance, that could be a big problem.

Niko: Wow. And so another bottleneck, of course, is... Let’s assume you’ve shipped this stuff there. The second big bottleneck seems to be UV radiation.

So it seems like you’re just trying to evolve microbes kind of naturally where you’re not putting in engineered systems or complex logic. But is there any concern that these microbes would just break because the radiation is so intense or they’re mutating so quickly that they stop producing bioplastics? How can you be sure that the biological function persists?

Erika: In the case of the first microbe, the idea is that you grow it in a controlled, contained environment. You grow it in a stirred heated bioreactor, which doesn’t have UV. So it’s protected from those particular extremes. And what it’s challenged to do is just deal with the really weird chemistry of what the raw materials are that it has access to on Mars. And so in that sense, it’s a good first step. It sidesteps all of these issues of: how do we deal with the temperature and pressure and UV?

But you’re totally right. In the broader sense of if we’re proposing to make a whole biosphere, it’s a big planet. And that means that all of our attempts to prevent or control what evolution might happen will probably not work. We have to expect we’re making a natural system that will evolve. We’re making real stuff for real outdoors. Not for controlled environments where you can sterilize everything and start over.

On the point of UV, Mars has a lot of surface radiation in part because again it has really thin atmosphere. It has so much surface radiation that it would be a problem today for prolonged exposure for a human and that’s because we have great big bodies and so we have many targets to hit. And if a piece of radiation comes in and hits my one cell over here, it can become cancerous. And it’s a whole problem for the whole bit of me.

In contrast, prokaryotes actually are quite radiation tolerant. So they have such small bodies. Essentially, there’s very little target to hit and they divide very quickly. So if you have an E. coli that’s dividing every 20 minutes, it’s kind of no problem if once an hour one of the E. coli gets killed. And so the prokaryotes are kind of not the issue here.

Some of the eukaryotes, like algae, it starts to be something you have to think about. There are some plants that are quite radiation tolerant, others not so much. When you think about the biosphere, it’s, I think, a little bit more of a matter of carefully choosing which organisms to use and making sure that they’re growing fast enough to outrun the radiation rather than spending huge amounts of energy repairing damage.

Niko: Do you have any indication of how fast microbes would be growing under such toxic nutrients, very low quality kind of nutrients, right? My hunch would be that their division rate would be maybe once per day or once every other day.

Erika: To be determined. And I think that’s what we’re trying to get to. So over the past couple years, we’ve tried to push toward again being able to actually simulate Mars. We started with the easy case of can we just simulate just the chemistry of the dirt? We got to get that right.

And now we’re moving into simulating not just the chemical environment, but also the physical environment and the physical reality of what would your experience be being a microbe growing in a pond in a simple greenhouse?

And so we’ve started to do things like we have a bunch of thermal modeling for what is the day night temperature swing and the seasonal temperature swing in a greenhouse on Mars. And so we’re starting to actually get to the level of detail where we can actually put numbers on things like how fast would this organism grow in a greenhouse?

And we also are starting to do things like... We have many little bits and pieces of equipment all around for many different ways to simulate the physical conditions of Mars, the low pressure, weird temperature swings and so on. At one point we were using a food dehydrator that you usually use to make jerky but you can hook it up to low pressure and stuff.

This is just one of our new boxes. You can depressurize this. You can put the whole cube into a freezer and you can shine lights on it in order to mimic the atmospheric pressure and composition, the temperature profile, and the illumination profile in a target environment on Mars.

Niko: And so you’re basing all of this on measurements, right? And again, as an outsider, as a biologist primarily who hasn’t studied Mars, my sense would be that we would have very good measurements on things like the atmosphere of Mars, these physical things, how much sunlight hits Mars, but that the actual chemical measurements of the dirt from these rovers might not actually be a great representation of what is on Mars, right?

It’s a rover in a place on Mars. And based on these very scattered measurements, you are designing this media that the whole mission kind of relies on, right? Will these microbes be able to live in this media and then make bioplastics? How can you be so confident that we have good enough measurements to simulate Mars on Earth?

Erika: This is also the thing that makes me nervous. And that’s why we started with the chemistry, because everyone knows how to make a vacuum chamber. And you’re right, we know what the pressure is. And so as you say, the place where the scary unknown unknowns lurk is in the dirt.

A couple causes for hope. So cause for hope number one, unlike on Earth where dirt on Earth, the composition of it is super dominated by what just died in it. Unlike that, Mars lacks that entire level of dirt variation that is generated by the entire history of things living and dying in a spot.

Niko: But things used to live on Mars and probably they lived on... Well, I guess we don’t know that, right?

Erika: We don’t know that.

Niko: So I’ll cut this out.

Erika: But we have measured this. So people have looked for organics in the dirt on Mars. So we know dinosaurs used to be here because there’s hydrocarbons. So people looked for hydrocarbons on Mars and guess what they found? Teeny, teeny, tiny trace amounts.

And we’re at the point with search for life on Mars where the teeniest, tiniest trace amount was super exciting to everyone, but it’s so low that it’s not going to matter for growth. So we have an upper bound on how much we should care about organics in the dirt. And it’s negligible from a perspective of growing new stuff.

And Mars has global dust storms. And so the top layer of regolith is super homogenous all around the planet. And we can confirm that in part because we have measured it at multiple spots. And that top layer, the fines, is quite homogenous. So that is some cause for hope.

That said, there’s no way to know whether or not there’s an unknown, unknown chemical in Mars dirt that maybe is at super low amounts, but is so toxic, nothing could ever grow. And that we don’t even know to look for it because we’ve never seen it or something. One certainly can imagine some sort of really unusual unknown unknown that would be a deal breaker. And the only way to resolve that existential risk is to go to Mars and try to grow stuff.

Niko: The problem is if you send something to Mars and it doesn’t grow, you have no idea why. It’s because it’s dead. And the problem with biology is we can only study things that are alive. And if it’s dead, it could have been a million different things.

Erika: It’s true. Although with good experimental design, much could be done. So you can send a microbe to Mars. You can bring some Earth LB. You can take a sample of Mars dirt and then you can do a dilution series between the two and see where it craps out. And at least you know at what concentration it dies, right?

Niko: You could try to get it back to Earth.

Erika: That would be ideal. And man, wouldn’t it be nice if we had sample return?

Niko: But you keep mentioning Starship and launching stuff to Mars and the cost.

I guess my question is even if you made all these microbes, which seems possible, it’s totally feasible to make a microbe that recycles perchlorates and you’ve already made progress on microbe number two doing the clear materials and you already have microbe number one. So how do you get on Starship? Is this a private donor is going to come and buy a Starship to launch to Mars? Or how does this...

Erika: I’m so glad you think we’re doing the thing. Yes, we’re doing the thing. So let’s just pause for a moment and just celebrate that you think that I’ve convinced you it’s possible because we’ve actually gotten started, which... Let’s just take a moment.

Niko: I’m not a skeptical audience.

Erika: That is true. Yeah. Look, you’re right. One of the cool things about this is that we have reduced the formerly incredible sci-fi concept of terraforming into an actionable engineering plan that consists of make five things with biology that seems feasible. And that itself is crazy and very cool.

Okay, separately, how do you actually get to Mars? In the past 10 years, our access to space and just Earth’s launch capacity has increased by at least a thousand fold in part because of Starship in particular, which is our new heavy launch vehicle that is kind of reusable and will eventually be actually fully reusable.

It’s now possible to contract a private company to take your payload box and put it on the moon and provide it with power and comms. That’s called a CLPS lander. So they’ve made a modular standard for if you want to send your box to the moon, here are the attachment points that it needs to have and here’s its dimensions. And it’s becoming commoditized to send stuff to the moon.

And the equivalent of CLPS for Mars doesn’t quite exist yet, but it’s coming. And it’s in the proposed congressional budgets to push toward that. Again, Mars is the next step beyond the moon and there remain things, engineering things that need doing. There needs to be some politics to make it possible to commoditize sending stuff to Mars. We need to be able to refuel Starship in orbit, which hasn’t been done yet, but will happen in the next few years.

And overall just instead of being this tremendously bespoke process to get to space where you have to find a government that wants to either make a brand new launch vehicle for your mission or manifest your payload on something they’re already doing for totally other science reasons. It’s becoming actually honest to God a thing that you can go to the marketplace and buy. Ten years ago, this would have been a crazy world to imagine.

Niko: How much does it cost?

Erika: There is not public prices for it yet because it hasn’t happened yet. But the movement is real toward expanding the public sort of reasonably public pricing or sort of understood pricing for the moon to Mars. I would expect that 2031 is going to be the first launch window when a commercial entity actually lands on Mars. And we’re hoping to have a payload on that spacecraft.

Niko: So Pioneer Labs is a nonprofit research organization. You’re many years out from this 2031 mission. You’re not spinning out companies, right? You’re developing a lot of tools internally that could be very useful to companies, but you’re not spinning out for profits that I’ve seen. So how do you actually sustain this? How do you keep going for the next five plus years?

Erika: So Pioneer Labs is a nonprofit, independent nonprofit. It’s in the style of a focused research organization. So the idea of a focused research organization is that there are some problems that are too big for academia or require too much multidisciplinary expertise or scale of resources to solve, but they’re also not sufficiently immediately profitable to be funded by venture capital.

And so what you need is a dedicated basically nonprofit startup that solves the bottleneck and then moves on to the next phase. And so that’s what Pioneer is.

And in general, our goal is to make the microbes and then figure out how to get them to fly, whether that is through a spin-out of our own or by licensing the technology out to others or facilitating it through collaboration. Our job is solving that bottleneck and then giving that technology the actual genuine best chance of being implemented by, in some cases, giving it away, or in other cases, creating for-profit incentives that can drive deployment.

Niko: I want to understand really explicitly your motivation for creating a new biosphere in the universe. Is it simply... So Chris McKay, a pioneer in terraforming Mars research, published many papers on this. He has just said that the goal of terraforming is to enhance the richness and diversity of life in the universe.

One thing I’ve always been curious about is if we just look out in the universe at all the planets and all the stars, the probability that there is life elsewhere, my view has always been that it would be kind of selfish and egotistical to assume that we’re the only life forms in the universe.

And so why do we need to go and create another biosphere? Is it that mapping this probabilistically is not enough? That taking it on faith that there’s life in the universe is not enough? That we need to be sure that there’s another planet? What is your motivation really?

Erika: This is such a crazy thing to say because when I think about it, it seems crazy to me that there would be life somewhere else. There’s just no evidence. There’s no evidence one way or another. You sort of arrive at this, oh, surely there’s life somewhere from a, well, it would be weird because if there isn’t, it’s egotistical.

Niko: They just don’t want to talk to us.

Erika: They just don’t want to talk to us. I think the thing that is fascinating about Mars and why so much of space science, mental energy is directed toward Mars rather than, say, the moon is because it has this weird twin situation going on with Earth.

Mars truly used to be nice. It looks exactly or used to look exactly like a place that really should have been able to support life 3.7 billion years ago. And so it is such an irresistible target for both searching for life and also trying to figure out whether it could be possible to create life that grows there.

And I would say our options are becoming kind of limited for what could we do to put some priors on do we think there’s life somewhere else in the universe? We can go to the ice moons in our solar system and check. They are great candidates. They’re far away. It’s going to take 20 years to just schlep out there to check.

What else are we going to do? Go to the nearest next habitable exoplanet and check. That’s going to take longer than my lifetime, right? So our options are kind of limited for how to gather data about the real universe we live in that might inform whether or not we’re alone.

I am impatient and I don’t know if we’re going to get our act together to go to ice moons, but a thing I could do is see if I could make life that grows on Mars. Because if so, and if it’s not just possible to get anything to grow in a Mars simulation chamber, but actually make a planet scale thing, can you actually make a biosphere that closes all of its loops on another planet that has similar but kind of different base chemistry and base raw materials?

That to me is something that changes my priors on is there life elsewhere in the universe? If it’s possible to actually have a functional biosphere on Mars, my probabilities go up.

Niko: If we actually wanted to increase the diversity and richness of life in the universe, wouldn’t it be better to not terraform Mars with Earth microbes, but just to kind of treat it as a directed evolution experiment where it maximizes the diversity of what things grow there? Is there any concern that just sending five microbes from Earth and seeding the planet with that will just limit its diversity long term, right? Because you’re kind of just duplicating stuff that already happens on Earth.

Erika: Yes, but I’m not sure how to do better, right? So I think we are constrained by life as we know it. So we know of carbon based water based life. That’s not necessarily the only thing there could be. But engineering something different is beyond current science, right? And so I can’t prove it’s impossible, it probably is possible, but we also can’t do it.

What we know from evolution experiments in the lab on Earth is if you grow something for long enough, ecology will evolve. So the long term evolution experiment literally evolved ecology. They were just passaging E. coli for decades and it essentially speciated all on its own. And I would expect that to happen on Mars. Even if we only send five things, they’ll figure out how to speciate on their own very likely.

Niko: The selection pressures are unique.

Erika: The selection pressures are so unique, so unusual and so unlike any combination, any environment we have on Earth. None of them are quite like Mars. Some of them have one overlapping piece, but none of them are quite like it.

Niko: If NASA announced tomorrow that they discovered life elsewhere in the universe, would you still be motivated to work on this?

Erika: Absolutely, yeah. I grew up as a teenager watching Star Trek. And I liked Star Trek and I think it set my philosophy for thinking about the universe in the sense that it’s this really positive vision for what humanity could grow up to be as this species that overcomes our technological adolescence and learns how to use our technology for good both socially and technically and retains the spirit of exploration and curiosity and I like that.

I think in the Star Trek universe they have this concise and satisfying way to do the ethics about life where it’s: if the civilization is pre-warp then you don’t talk to them. If the civilization is post-warp then you get to talk to them. So in this imaginary world where life is plentiful in the universe the ethics of how do you go out and interact with other life forms is sort of obvious.

And I think in a universe that doesn’t have as much life in it, that’s much more dicey because suddenly even microbial life or even the hint of possible life becomes something that we don’t know how to handle because we’re searching so hard for someone else to talk to. And so I really hope there is a life somewhere else.

Niko: No, but wouldn’t that update your priors on the motivation to work on Mars was you can see it. And if we can close the cycles, it increases your priors that there’s life elsewhere in the universe, right? But if there is life elsewhere in the universe, then that’s no longer a motive, right? I think then it becomes about having a backup biosphere and...

Erika: No, it’s not.

Niko: Well, then what would...

Erika: I hate this term, “backup planet.” Oh, my God. People say this. No one should say this. It’s like saying you want a second kid as a backup. That’s not why you want a second kid. You want a second kid because you had a first kid and you want at least two, right? Biospheres are magic and we should have at least two, right? That’s why. Nature good, more nature better. Life interesting, more diverse life better, right?

I would love to understand whether or not there’s more life in the universe, but that’s the scientific motivation. There’s more motivations, too, of just my experience on this planet is one of wanting to go outdoors and smell the flowers and taking so much delight in how curious and weird all these crazy plants and animals and microbes are on this planet.

Complex systems are cool in part because you can’t study them by isolating just one component. They only have emergent properties when you put them together and nature is that way where you can’t just have one tree in a pot. You have to have a forest and forests have cool and exotic and fascinating properties because they’re complex and composed of many parts.

And so I think it’s that complexity, the ability of nature to surprise us and delight us and evolve and have emergent properties. That’s the thing that is cool and intriguing. And I would like for future humans to have more of that rather than less of that.

I hate this progression, this constant progression toward a life that is totally predetermined and entirely based on totally robust and predictable, abiotic processes where we get our calories from some chemical process that makes vinegar for us to drink. I just think it sounds horrible. I like the nature part of life, and I think we should have more rather than less of it.

Niko: Well, Erika, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Erika: Thank you so much. This was fun.

Asimov Press

How to Terraform Mars — Erika DeBenedictis of Pioneer Labs

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