[DannyTN]

"There is no life beyond earth other than whatever space-surviving virions or bacteria we’ve flung out there on some spacecraft."

I'm a big fan of flinging.

We should engineer or select for bacteria that can survive on Mars and Venus. And we should massively seed the planets.

We've flown a drone on Mars. And we have drones capable of spraying. So we just need a drone capable of refueling from a large tank of seed bacteria.

Of course some planning is required. You don't want to put bacteria on Mars that releases oxygen if that oxygen is just going to be stripped away due to the lack of the magnetosphere or some other reason. So maybe we need to build a ring around the planet and a nuclear power plant to create a magnetosphere before we fling bacteria.

[muir_redwoods]

“ I’m a big fan of flinging.”

Asimov didn’t recommend it but suggested that a few kilograms of every available species of algae could be seeded throughout the atmosphere of Venus from the highest layers down.

Then we just wait a few centuries until it gets itself terraformed.

[absalom01]

There's always the old idea of putting some sort of reactor on Phobos to preserve an atmosphere on Mars.