The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for the development of emerging technology for use by the U.S. military, has unveiled its plans to develop technology designed to terraform Mars.

This bid to develop technology which could create human-habitable conditions on the red planet seeks to transform hostile places through genetic engineering, the Daily Mail reports.

These genetically engineered organisms designed to endure the harsh Martian climate could entail plants, algae and other organisms capable of heating the planet up and thickening its atmosphere, Motherboard explained in a report.

Alicia Jackson, the deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, was quoted by Motherboard in the aforementioned report as having said at a biotech conference on Monday that we now “have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay.”

For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay (…) There are anywhere from 30 million to 30 billion organisms on this Earth. We use two right now for engineering biology (…) I want to use any organism that has properties I want – I want to quickly map it and quickly engineer it (…) With this, the goal is to, within a day, sequence and find where I can best engineer an organism.

NASA has stated its intent to send humans to Mars in a manned mission in the 2030s, a mission which the U.S. space administration claims nobody is going to achieve without their support.

What are your thoughts on DARPA’s plans to engineer organisms with the intention of terraforming Mars?