To sustain human life (which is what we're concerned about here, or nobody would be talking about Mars), we would need to grow actual edible food, not putz around with bacteria. Unless you've discovered an extremophile potato, they're not really relevant to the conversation are they?
I suppose if we could get bacteria to grow there they might begin changing the environment on Mars to make it more conducive to life, but they wouldn't give Mars a magnetic field, or move it's orbit closer to the Sun, and anything they could accomplish would be taking place on a geologic timescale, meaning it would still be irrelevant to us, and probably to all of our future descendants.
Well, thanks for coming to the point. I didn't understand that's what you were driving at before.
I completely agree with you about the need to grow our own food there. I'm pretty sure we've got the technology down pat to construct greenhouses with controlled environments sealed inside.
Seems to me, the biggest problem would be the simple logistics of shipping all of the components there. It would cost a tremendous amount of money, and take a very long time to get it all in place, given our slow propulsion technology. If I recall, it costs $10,000 a pound to get anything into space.
I'd almost prefer to slow down the Mars exploration timetable and concentrate efforts on building a better rocket ship. We need the capacity to lift greater payloads at a smaller cost. Secondly, we need to be able to move those payloads to their distant destinations at far greater speeds to make these projects more practical.
As to the extremophiles, why not? If that rock is dead, we may as well start seeding it as soon as we get there. It'll pay off in some long distant future.