Archive: https://archive.today/KMBh4 From the post: >>The best way I’ve found to get a room full of scientists to think creatively is to tell them we’re going to terraform Mars. Scientific progress is famously dependent on luck, which makes attempts to “go faster” hard. One reliable way to tilt the odds is to begin with a familiar problem and impose genuinely new constraints. Doing that has a way of stripping away the comfortable defaults, and forcing you to ask different questions than you have before. In that vein, my former academic lab set out with an extremely nonstandard constraint—the goal of terraforming Mars—and, in trying to make that goal concrete, we ran into a technical blocker that pushed us into a new approach to enzyme engineering. The result was a paper on engineering halogenase enzymes and their application to making therapeutics, now out in Nature Communications. The toolchain we created turned out to be useful for nearer-term applications on Earth, a small but vivid example of how “weird” constraints can produce practical innovations.