Synthetic biology has the potential to make organisms more resistant to radiation or temperature extremes. You can mix and match genes and do all sorts of things that if you were breeding [organisms] would take forever. Say we find a planet, and it has a certain pH, temperature, and radiation regime. That’s where we take up the challenge and go into the lab. We’ll say, “All right, let’s start with this one that can live at low pH and high temperature. Can we add the radiation resistance?” Then, we can go back to the astronomers and say that [habitability] is not impossible, because we just made something in the lab like that last week.

/We Might Create Alien Life in a Lab Before We Find It in Space/