Terraforming in the OTU

[Malenfant]

Since the Terraforming in the Solar System thread has devolved into arguing about divergence points from the OTU and people there don't seem interested in getting back on topic, I thought it would be nice to start a new thread about terraforming in the OTU for people who did actually want to talk about it.

so... what's your take on terraforming in the OTU?

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Malenfant

Since the Terraforming in the Solar System thread has devolved into arguing about divergence points from the OTU and people there don't seem interested in getting back on topic, I thought it would be nice to start a new thread about terraforming in the OTU for people who did actually want to talk about it.

so... what's your take on terraforming in the OTU?

I think it's mostly something that the Ancients did.

Sometimes a wealthy and advanced polity might 'tweak' a world just a wee bit. I'm talking about things like cleaning up toxins in the otherwise breathable air, not radical terraforming.

I have some notes on a low tech ice-age Earthlike world, the gov't of which encouraged rampant consumption of the world's plentiful fossil fuels. This is a 'quick and dirty' way of raising the temeprature by inducing global warming.

With cheap, reliable FTL travel and a lot of Erathlike worlds out there, I don't see much incentive for hideously expensive and very long-term terraforming projects. It may happen in some places, but it's going to be rare.

A STL civilization that developed in isolation might make use of terraforming if some collossal disaster crippled the biosphere of the homeworld. They might be terraforming their homeworld, in fact!

[Malenfant]

(reposted from the other thread) Here's an interesting article that may provide food for thought:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/1645

"The hubris involved in genetic engineering is several orders of magnitude smaller than that involved in terraforming. At least we’re good at the former, as the variety and quality of our foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals attest. Nor would we be condemning entire worlds or species to destruction. Terraforming is a battering ram, genetic engineering is a scalpel. Which one would you prefer for a delicate, complex operation — whether this is repairing a watch, performing a heart bypass or fine-tuning a new world?"

(the quote in bold also showed up at NASA's recent "100 year starship" study).

This also illustrates some more Ancient craziness - they expended a lot of effort in genetically engineering pre-human stock from Earth to various other planets, and yet they also apparently wasted a lot of time terraforming worlds? And also they didn't do much genetic engineering on themselves apparently (not sure if the introduction of "coyns" really counts, since that's a psionic thing).

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Malenfant

(reposted from the other thread) Here's an interesting article that may provide food for thought:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/1645

"The hubris involved in genetic engineering is several orders of magnitude smaller than that involved in terraforming. At least we’re good at the former, as the variety and quality of our foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals attest. Nor would we be condemning entire worlds or species to destruction. Terraforming is a battering ram, genetic engineering is a scalpel. Which one would you prefer for a delicate, complex operation — whether this is repairing a watch, performing a heart bypass or fine-tuning a new world?"

(the quote in bold also showed up at NASA's recent "100 year starship" study).

This also illustrates some more Ancient craziness - they expended a lot of effort in genetically engineering pre-human stock from Earth to various other planets, and yet they also apparently wasted a lot of time terraforming worlds? And also they didn't do much genetic engineering on themselves apparently (not sure if the introduction of "coyns" really counts, since that's a psionic thing).

They're Sufficiently Advanced Eldritch Abominations. Who knows how they think?

[combatmedic]

Maybe the Ancients simply intended that humanity would inherit the stars. This would explain why they deliberately spread humans to so many worlds, and why they terraformed some of those worlds.
That seems like the most logical conclusion, although it may not ncessarilly be the correct one.

[Malenfant]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Maybe the Ancients simply intended that humanity would inherit the stars. This would explain why they deliberately spread humans to so many worlds, and why they terraformed some of those worlds.
That seems like the most logical conclusion, although it may not ncessarilly be the correct one.

Well, supposedly they tried using humans as helpers/pets. Though you have cases like Vland, which wasn't particularly conducive to human life at all... so instead of genetically engineering their humans they just kinda left them to their own devices (despite genetically engineering other humans).

[RainOfSteel]

Originally Posted by Malenfant

so... what's your take on terraforming in the OTU?

Terraforming in the OTU? Sorry, I don't have much of a view on that. OTU information is too variable on certain subjects to make bold or definitive statements.

My views are all MTU:

It happens but requires excellent technology and wants far better, costs trillions of credits, and needs hundreds (300-500) of years to bring to fruition.

Fortunately the Imperium is vastly wealthy and has had plenty of time to accomplish any terraforming effort. MTU has had a number of successes and failures. I don't want to get hammered down on numbers, but maybe twenty serious attempts over the 3I's history (things that didn't get abandoned only a hundred years into the project for no real effect). Most attempts succeeded. Some did not and have become civil engineering disaster legends.

This matches up with my no free-roaming, self-replicating nanotech policy (i.e. no magic, at least at given TLs). If you had advanced nanotech, you would just drop a seed onto a world and magically it would be transformed into whatever you had designed. This also matches up with many Golden Age SF ideas about terraforming.

Lesser environment modification attempts abound on a far larger scale. Wealthy worlds can pay to get Weather Engineering (improves Ag or Ri status), Hydrographic Engineering (moves water over desert worlds and/or removes tain), Atmospheric Engineering (removes air taint), or Advanced Recycling (removes water taint, not as intrusive as other systems), allowing for some worlds to be Industrial, Rich, and possibly Agricultural at least as long as they keep spending money. Such wondrous places should be real, at least a few of them. The absence of such massive civil engineering project technologies in the original CT Traveller was as obvious to me as the absence of medical technology (or health care).

Originally Posted by Malenfant

But there aren't "any number of reasons" for that. It's completely idiotic to waste trillions of credits and spend years and years to terraform a borderline world when a perfectly (or at least "much more") habitable one is within easy reach in the next system.

In many cases you would be correct. But not in all.

In at least one case MTU Cleon Zhunhastu I decided to terraform Ion/Core (DGP world name) solely to demonstrate the might and implacable will of the Imperium. Other projects have been launched for similar reasons. Land and business development on this reshaped Ion/Core have been immense since before the beginning of the Civil War and have been more than enough basis to squeeze through a few more such projects Imperium-wide.

Originally Posted by Malenfant

The standard assumption in the OTU seems to be that [...] Ancients [...] are phenomenally stupid and irrational.

The Ancients effectively had magic technology and could do whatever they wanted. Who knows what their mindset was or why they did anything? Who knows for sure if even the Grandfather/droyne idea was correct (it is connonically, and is interesting to be sure, but I hardly want the Ancient's mystery solved in any game I run).