Asteroid synbiosphere project

From Biohack

The asteroidal synbiosphere project idea came up in a mailing list discussion with Dan on hplusroadmap on 2008-03-15. By understanding the matter/energy requirements of organisms, we can use synthetic biology to design a complete ecosystem on an asteroid surface, where all organisms are characterized, in the sense of their genomes (but not their mutations and their recombinations from breeding), and all mineral requirements are satisfied before-hand via careful selection of an asteroid. This would go hand-in-hand with asteroid mining, but this project need not necessarily export any material resources. The design challenge would be to have a multi-level food chain, one with photosynthetic autotrophs and omnivores and so on.