Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanW
If you were to back off of the Mars terraforming projections to a more conservative level, what else might that change about the setting? The most obvious issue is the Duncanites. Would they have been forced into exile for starting a process that wouldn't show significant effect for hundreds of years? Anything else that might have to be modified to work with such a change?
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Slow Mars terraforming
- I don't see a large scale settlement on Mars if the process is slower. Science bases, sure, but not a huge colonization effort.
- without resources spent on Mars, if space competition continued, I'd probably see a larger Chinese presence in Saturn (with them and the US having competing bases) or in and around Luna. The competition around Saturn would probably be more interesting and necessary if want to justify the large military presence. If not, scale back the space fleets to orbital space.
- Without a huge colonization on Mars, the "Martian Triad" group would not exist, or would move to wherever else - possibly Earth orbit or Junk Jungle - that China went.
Ducanites
- If the Duncanites did initiate such a process and it was irreversible but slow (centuries) I would say "yes" - it was the initiation of the *process* that was objected to, not the time required. However, if the process was slow enough, it might be reversible and hence no terraforming might have been done.
- If it was irreversible, I think people would be MORE annoyed with the Duncanites, since the annoyance for fast-terraforming was mitigated by the fact that many saw a terraformed Mars as a "good." But a terraformed Mars several hundred years from now (or whatever) will have less appeal: for many it will seem the Duncanites were fanatics whose actions had no practical value.
- Given that most of the Duncanites are specified as being somewhat practical and business oriented despite their ideology, it is possible they would agree, and have never initiated a terraforming action under these circumstances. Or that the ideologues among them would did would not have been able to win the support of the more practical elements. Result: no successful Duncanite society.