Terraforming in the OTU

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by dwightemarsh

My understanding is that governments that span more than one star system are not legal in the Imperium. So, if a government wants more living space for its citizens, terraforming is the only game in town. Sure, they could encourage their citizens to immigrate to another planet. Those citizens would not be their citizens anymore, would they?

We dealt with the living space issue in the other thread.

On a planet the size of Earth, with Earthlike conditions, a HUGE number of human beings can live quite comfortably for an indefinite period of time. On Earth, we could fit our entire population fairly comfortably into just Texas. The real issue on Earth isn't space. Any good sized planet likely has plenty of surface area. Energy supply, pollution, clean water, etc are all much more important. The resources consumed in terraforming uninhabitable worlds (Venus or Mars, for example) could be put to much better use building megacities, turning deserts into gardens, creating hyper-efficient global transportation and communications systems, etc etc. At any TL below the really high ones, this is a lot cheaper and faster than trying to terraform something like Mars.

Of course, not all well-developed worlds are Earthlike.There are no doubt a number of scenarios in which terraforming makes sense. I'm not saying that terraforming is unworkable or impossible in the OTU. I'm saying that it's generally not a good option for anyone who already has a habitable world, or can move to such a world.