Reprinted On The Red Planet: Could We "Grow" Humans To Colonize Mars?

Martian exploration is a tempting challenge for space agencies worldwide, but NASA's current budgetary woes and the extensively dangerous elements of such an operation are keeping any advanced projects on the red planet still firmly in the realm of science fiction.

However, scientists have pondered a fascinating plan to colonize Mars much in the way that they suspect life arrived here on earth: first send bacteria to terraform the harsh environment, then send bacteria encoded with DNA plans.

The Huffington Post quoted Harvard biologist Gary Ruvkun as saying, "If we could also send along assembly instructions, for the bacteria to produce an array of descendent organisms that assemble the genome segments over some time period into a human, it is a way to 'print' humans remotely."

The ability to "encode" the human genome into bacteria may be within our reach in the next few decades, and though it may be some time before the human-printing "instructions" can manifest, the idea offers an interesting option for the beginning of Martian colonization.