Robotic Badger-Like Bioreactors Could Help Colonize Solar System

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Microbes are clever little buggers —- for decades, they've been used by the mining industry to efficiently extract some 25 percent of the world's gold and copper in a more environmentally friendly manner. But U.K. astrobiologist Charles Cockell thinks they also hold promise off world.

Cockell, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, has put forth the idea of using bioengineered microbes to process organic materials on the moon, Mars, the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter and even farther afield in our solar system.

This, in part, hinges on bioengineering earth-microbes into more robust organisms to protect them from extreme off world environments, typically characterized by high energy radiation, massive temperature fluctuations and the vacuum of space itself. Such advanced biotechnology won't come easy, and it won't be developed overnight.

But Cockell envisions literal armies of robotic machines that can be used to microbially process the raw materials of our solar system into industrial feedstocks. These processed feedstocks could then be used to eventually construct far-flung space colonies way out in our solar system.

The payoff in using such bioengineering is in time. By using microbial bioreactors to fashion the necessary materials to build science-fiction like off world outposts, such ingenuity could perhaps shave decades off stepwise space exploration.

A lot of people misunderstand this as mining asteroids to bring stuff back to earth, Cockell, told me at the recent European Astrobiology Network Association 2024 Conference in Graz, Austria. But it's more about extracting elements to support a human presence in space, he says.

Microbes could also be used to extract lower concentration elements, like rare earth, or platinum group elements —- almost anything that's in a lump of volcanic basalt just as they do in the process of bio-mining on earth, says Cockell.

Microbes are natural chemical factories and over billions of years, they have evolved to carry out chemical transformations, says Cockell.