[Rain Man]

I read once long ago a concept that seems cool, and which seems more feasible than ever.

The original concept talked about Venus and how the atmosphere has too much carbon dioxide in it. But apparently there's some sort of bacteria that eats carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. So all you do is shoot a rocket of this bacteria into Venus' atmosphere where it goes to town like a sumo wrestler at an all you can eat buffet. You wait 500 years or so and then you've got a nice atmosphere full of oxygen to breathe.

With all of the specialized forms of life that have been discovered in recent years, it seems like the first permanent residents won't be human, but rather will be some type of organism that lives on sulfur or carbon dioxide or some other nasty element, and that spits out stuff that we like - oxygen and hydrogen and stuff. Once their work is done, you send the next generation of microbes or whatever to build up more of the stuff we like and less of the stuff we hate. Then you send tadpoles or something, and just keep working your way up the food chain, maybe throwing in the occasional mammoth for fun.

I think that human colonization would ideally not involve people in spacesuits living in sealed environments. Ideally, we do a few hundred years of investment, and then land our ships in a new Garden of Eden. Wouldn't that be cool?