Yeast could be the key to building the first Martian cities

This humble organism can be the alternative to using prohibitively expensive, huge machinery and resources.

[Source Images: Getty Images]

Building a human civilization on Mars will be orders of magnitude harder than any of the human migrations on Earth ever were. Here, you can build refuge anywhere, which is why our civilization is everywhere from pole to pole.

If we ever hope to live on the red planet, we must build with the red dirt right beneath our boots, a challenge that has long been thought to demand expensive, huge industrial machinery and nuclear plant-level power generation. Now, a team of researchers has unveiled a radical, low-energy alternative in which a crew could carry a tiny tube of dormant yeast from Earth, breed trillions of helper cells in a vat using Martian carbon dioxide and........

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