Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

Frankly, I think the justifications presented for terraforming here seem very keen to find reasons for its viability regardless of the realities of the process anyway (much like any "why would they do that?" problem in Traveller, to be honest).

That being the case, it's best to describe Terraforming as what it really is - one of the grandest follies imaginable. It's nothing but a pointless and extravagant waste of time to occupy a society that could have otherwise solved its habitability problems in a myriad of other, simpler, and more economical short-term ways.

Terraforming is not remotely an 'equilibrium' state for a society. The likelihood of its completion would be very low given the other pressures against it (internal politics, funding, physical issues, changes of heart etc). I would suspect that societies that tried this would completely bankrupt themselves (socially or economically) before the process was anywhere near complete and would inevitably settle back towards the equilibrium of saner, short-term solutions.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

And just how many major terraforming projects is there evidence for in the Classic Era? The Ancients did terraforming. The Darrians did a little. There's a few major Imperial and Solomani terradorming projects mentioned in canon. Small scale terraforming (improving parts of already livable worlds) seems to be pretty widespread. But those grand folly projects you express so much scorn for are not really that numerous.


Hans

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

Pretty much all of their "terraforming" was the in-setting excuse for the inadequacies of the world generation system. Remove those inadequacies, and the Ancients did very little terraforming at all.

True, there's one in the Solomani Rim (Hephaistos?). Small scale terraforming (e.g. irrigation of deserts) is fine. I'm just saying that once one stops trying to make up crazy excuses to justify global terraforming and just accept that it's going to be too much hassle in the vast majority of cases, one isn't going to see a lot of it.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

Because it isn't particularly relevant.

All settlement involves transforming the environment of the settled area. The question is whether the settlers have two things:

1. The physical ability to to so, and

2. They wish to settle there, for whatever reason, badly enough pay the price/expend the effort to exercise the ability in 1.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

'Crazy' is relative. It depends pretty much entirely on one's frame of reference. Settling North America was crazy for the Pilgrmims, too...from the point of view of economic rationality. They had other motives.

Motives are infinitely variable.

From a cold economic POV, the existence of relatively cheap FTL technology would appear to make terraforming always too expensive to bother with. Yet human history is packed with activities that make no economic sense, yet happened anyway, because economics is subordinate to culture, religion, and politics, once you're past the hard limits of technological possibility and available resources.

'Worth' is not a meaningful concept unless you have a specific frame of reference for what is and is not valuable. This varies enormously, even amid different countries, cultures, and religions in the real world today. In a world of multiple galactic cultures, the variation would only be greater.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

This is terraforming a hostile planet, not settling North America a few hundred years ago. It doesn't compare at all.

Do people even understand the magnitude of what has to be done to terraform a world? It's not just "stick some smokestacks on a planet and leave to cook for a while".


And culture, religion, and politics are infinitely more fickle that technology. Look at the US Manned Space Program - Apollo died because of politics, and the Space Shuttle ultimately died because of that too - and that's over the timescale of a decade or two. You have projects dying and being born every 4 years or so because of elections. Even dictators die and their "visions" die with them when their replacements come along. Does anyone honestly think that a terraforming project that takes decades or centuries would survive that long?

Time is valuable. Peoples' effort is valuable. Resources are valuable. That is the case in Traveller, as it is now.

There is absolutely nothing that one can gain from terraforming that isn't there already - you want the planet's resources? Then mine them - it doesn't matter if the atmosphere's breathable or not. You want living space? Dig out some caverns, seal them up, fill them with air. Or build space stations or habitats. Or a honking great dome over a large area. You don't need to change the entire planetary environment to do that.

This is why I think it's a folly. Extremely advanced societies who think nothing of largescale manipulation of matter and megascale engineering projects and have near infinite resources and energy, and who also have nothing better to do may start and finish them, but that's not the OTU.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

In the end, that doesn't matter at all, because the difference is only one of degree.

And yes, the comparison between the settlement of North America is comparable. Or for that matter, the settlement of Europe. Everywhere humans have gone on Earth, outside of our homelands in Africa and the Middle East, we've transformed the environment, sometimes to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of the people who currently live there. We've already significantly transformed Earth, and the process continues.

The fact that terraforming is several orders of magnitude more difficult than anything done in previous history is only an issue of time and scale. It's not a fundamental barrier.

Apollo lived in the first place because of ephemeral politics. It's not really a relevant comparison because it had no deep foundations.

History holds many examples of multi-generational projects that stayed on track. Our current time period, the modern West of the last few centuries, is historically abnormal.

How is that relevant? The Pilgrims didn't 'need' to do what they did, either...except that for their own reasons, they thought they did. America didn't 'need' to transform much fo the west into irrigated farmland...except that for cultural reasons, our great grandparents and grandparents thought they did. That made no economic sense, either, but involved moving entire rivers thousands of miles, creating artificial lakes bigger than entire counties,
and the expenditure of immense sums over the course of over a century.

The people of early-Western Europe didn't 'need' to build enormous elaborately decorated cathedrals over generations...but they did it. The early monastic orders had no 'need' to go into remote areas and convert wilderness into farmland, but they did it, because they 'needed' it by their own standards. What people 'need' depends on what they believe in, on what they value, all of economics ultimately turns on unmeasurable intangibles.

Trying to apply today's economic, cultural, and religious standards to either the past or the future is an exercise in futility. Motives depend on countless factors that simply can't be calculated outside the frame of reference of a time or place.

Would most groups capable of terraforming opt to do it instead of going elsewhere (assuing both options were available)? Probably not. Can we assume that it won't happen because of that? Nope. Odds are, based on past human history, that some people would find their own reasons to do the 'irrational' thing.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

I can think of a few circumstances with reasons for terraforming in the OTU.

A) The Ancients - They did a lot of weird things.

B) Minor Races - They do not have jump drive and thus terraforming a nearly habitable world to their lking may be a viable option.

C) Prestige - An interstellar government may elect to terraform a world as a show of political or industrial strength.

D) Low Mass Worlds With Thick Atmospheres - Below a certain mass, a world will lose its atmosphere over a period of time. Worlds in this category use terraforming to build up an acceptable atmosphere for the inhabitants.

None of these violate the consistancy of the OTU canon.

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

I won't presume to tell you what is and what isn't realistic in Real Life, but SF literature is chock full of planets that have been terraformed by dumping a carefully selected load of catalysts or bioengineered organisms and waiting for several decades or centuries. So it's defintely a full blown SF trope. I'd say that if it isn't true, it at least ought to be. It's just too good a story not to believe in.


Hans

Re: Terraforming in the OTU
 

The problem with trying to calculate whether something is 'likely' is that in any story (or gaming world), the characters are almost always motivated by current-day motives and priorities, even if the story or game is set 1000 years in the future or the past. It's very hard get into the mindset of a person from another culture in our time, it's harder to do so across time, and it's hard to create much sympathy or interest in readers or players for different cultural mindsets.

So the questiona almost always ends up turning into 'Would WE do 'x' if we had those options open to us?' But that limits the possibilities and is very unrealistic.