When we talk about colonising space and becoming a multi-planetary species, we don't often go into much detail. I think most can't comprehend the immense amount of work that would be required to build a permanent human settlement on other planets.

The Earth that we know today was built over thousands of years, with people migrating from one place to place and slowly constructing towns and cities and everything was just so organic.

The colonising efforts will be much more deliberate and there would need to be a lot of materials and people shipped from our planet. The sheer size of this endeavour boggles the mind.

But if a recent invention can prove itself to be useful, it can lessen a lot of the burden. Scientists recently created "living concrete" and if this turns out like they expect it to, this could change construction forever.

Living Concrete

A team of scientists at the University of Colorado have created something called a "living concrete" in partnership with DARPA. It is basically a mixture of gelatin, sand and cyanobacteria. It can heal itself and even more impressive, can even grow itself.

This sure sounds like something an advanced alien race would have! Even after the scientists cut a sample of the material three times, it managed to regenerate.

The cyanobacteria in the material die off after several weeks but can be rejuvenated under the right conditions. If the team can figure out a way to scale this technology, it could do wonders in the field self-assembling materials.

It could also make colonising other planets much easier as we would just be able to take truckloads of this material to our desired planet and grow the structure we want on-site, instead of having to ship everything there and assemble it.

It is technologies like this that will have to come together to make the dream of becoming an inter-planetary species a reality. In the coming decades, I hope to read about more and more about stuff like this.