Endless Possibilities - Part One: Bringing Life to Mars

Chapter 8: Gardening

After breakfast and farm chores the next morning, Newt and Sedna were back in their apartment preparing to go to the new dome. 

Sedna was in her Mars form. She always shifted when she went in the farm now. "It feels so much more intimate this way. I'm not sure if it's the moss hair or the bird lungs. Maybe both," she said. 

Newt was about to go to the centrifuge as usual. Instead of settling into her recliner in the room, Sedna had opened the closet where they kept their space suits.

"What are you doing?" Newt asked her. 

"Getting ready to go out to the dome." She took her suit down from the rack and started to put it on.

Newt's face showed his concern. "I know you don't need to use the centrifuge anymore. But why the space suit? What are you thinking?"

"I want to go to the dome in person. I can't wait. I love being in the farm so much. And there's quite a bit of oxygen from the plants in the dome now. Between that and my hair I think it will be enough. I've got to try it."

"But what if it's not enough?"

"I won't push it. I'll just sit on the ground by the plants and make sure they're doing okay. If I need to I can always jump back in the suit."

Newt knew he wasn't going to stop her. But he watched when she went out the air lock from the farm into the lava tube, until she was out of sight.

Once he was in the centrifuge it took Newt only a minute to activate his drone in the dome. He knew how long it took to fly a drone from the farm tube to the dome, and he knew that the space suit had the same sun bottle with DDM capability, so he knew how long it would take Sedna to get there. Still, he got a little anxious waiting for her to show up. He was about to take his drone outside to look for her when she came in through the air lock.

Newt beamed at her when she opened her helmet and shook out her glorious green hair. "Hi gorgeous. How's it feel?" he said.

She took a deep bird-breath. "It's wonderful," she said. "In the tube farm it smells like Earth. Here it smells like Mars."

"I think your new hair likes it too," he said. "It looks greener than ever."

She smiled at him. "Plenty of CO2 and water. I can almost feel it growing."

"You've already got quite a bush going on. It looks great, but how long will you let it go before you trim it?"

"As long as I can stand it. the more oxygen it gives me the better. But now that I have the whole shift trained in I plan to shift to my normal Earth form every night. I don't want my body to get stuck this way.  When I shift back in the morning I can reset the size of my bush if I want to. I won't actually have to trim it."

She felt really good. This Mars form was working. But she knew that she still had to be careful not to exert herself too much. Fortunately there was plenty for her to do, squatting in front of the little plants one by one and quietly guiding their new growth. The nearly pure CO2 atmosphere made the plants want to grow faster than they should. She was afraid they would overtax the newly developing soil. Already there was a need to maintain balance.

She mentioned this to Newt and Mister Green. They agreed that it was something they had to watch. 

Mister Green said, "There's something else we need to pay attention to. There's plenty of nitrogen in the soil, already in forms suitable for the needs of the plants. But the lack of nitrogen in the air is a concern. As the oxygen becomes more and more plentiful, it will reach a point where there is danger of fire. It wouldn't do to have our project self-destruct."

"Don't the nitrogen compounds in the soil naturally break down?" Sedna asked him.

"Over time, but not fast enough to keep up with the amount of oxygen being generated."

"How can we speed up the process?" asked Newt.

"There's already a bacterium in the soil that breaks down the nitrogen compounds. There just aren't enough of them to release nitrogen as fast as the compounds are being generated and oxygen is being released."

"Paracoccus denitrificans." Sedna had been boning up on the applicable biology. "It's similar to mitochondria. Probably the original source of mitochondria."

Mister Green understood the little life forms and their processes very well, but he was not familiar with all the scientific names people had for them. So he just nodded to her.

"What can we do about it?" Newt asked.

"We can set aside a little corner of the dome for them and let them go to work full time." 

"And encourage our excess nitrogen compounds to migrate to that corner. Sounds like a perfect job for me," Sedna volunteered. "I could almost do it in my sleep."

So that's the way it went. With Mister Green's help, she was able to locate the excess nitrogen compounds and the denitrificans bacteria and persuade them to migrate to the same corner of the dome, much the way the oxygen from her hair was persuaded to migrate to her lungs. 

Before many more days had passed there was a perceptible release of nitrogen gas from that corner. She encouraged it further until the rate of nitrogen production would be enough to overtake the oxygen production and bring the atmosphere into better balance. In time this would lead to a more Earth-like atmosphere within the dome. And even a more Earth-like pressure. 

Their terraforming project was working. Sedna began planning how to present it to the Walden project backers, and ask them for a bigger dome.