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.
Cockell first sees such biotechnology being used off world to extract nickel, copper or iron from rocks on the moon.
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.
Why Microbes?
Microbes are natural chemical factories and over billions of years, they have evolved to carry out chemical transformations, says Cockell.
They could help turn organic compounds from carbonaceous asteroids into raw materials suitable to manufacture plastics, pharmaceuticals, or even building materials that might be used in the outer solar system.
In a 2021 paper appearing in the journal Microbial Biotechnology, Cockell writes that bio engineered microbes could reduce the quantity of material that must be shipped from Earth to supply local requirements, allowing a human outpost to eventually become self-sustaining.
A MUNCHer (Microbial UtilizatioN of Carbonaceous asteroids for High value products) varies from the size of a badger to a large truck, Cockell notes in his paper. A mandible-like contraption on the front end of the muncher would break off raw asteroidal material and crushes it, he writes.
The robotic MUNCHers themselves would be powered by nuclear and/or solar energy.
And in the process of crushing raw material, asteroidal or planetary water would be melted and used to provide a fluid for the bioreactors, Cockell notes.
The MUNCHers would walk across asteroids; crunch up the rock, and internal or even external bioreactors would process that material into useful elements or compounds that would then be used by robots or humans. The MUNCHers wouldn’t be responsible for turning raw material into finished products. But they would ready the microbially-processed material into precursor industrial feedstocks that could then be used for 3D printing.
Tens of thousands of such robots would slowly work their way through rocks in our solar system’s Main Asteroid Belt and eventually the outer solar system —- including the icy objects of the Kuiper Belt, and the far distant Oort Cloud of comets, says Cockell.
