Terraforming in the OTU

[ak_aramis]

The "Dump & Wait" strategy was actually proposed for Venus back in the 1970's, shortly after publication of the results of the Venera probes.

The problem isn't the delivery (We can get the microbes to Venus), nor, really, with the microbes needed (we can simply apply steady selection to certain acid tolerant bacteria to get the needed microbes in a decade or less)... it's the political will to spend the $250M on the project when it will result in a "superbug"... the project would look from the outside like a bioterrror facility.

Needed: airborne bacterium that eats H2SO4 and CO2, releases H2O and O2, binds carbon and sulfer, and can tolerate 490°C.

Venus' own winds should disperse it widely...

[dcarson]

Terraforming also doesn't have to a a all or nothing matter. If the planet is say too cold every degree you raise the temperature will still add more usable area. So making a habit of picking the industrial process that releases more greenhouse gasses when there are choices as long as it isn't much more expensive with tax breaks to reinforce that. The federal government currently allocates one half of a percent of building projects for artwork. A policy of allocating a percent or two for all projects for features that will work toward making the planet closer to norms can add up over generations.

[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).

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Malenfant

It doesn't, unless it's over a border. Unless you're saying that the Imperium restricts movement of people around its worlds.

It will belong to a different system government.

[PoorMerchant]

Sorry to open up the debate again - but it seems to me that everyone is regarding terraforming as conscious plan to alter a planet to make it habitable for humans. If one looks at Earth much of the current debate about global warming accepts that we have been doing some terraforming already right here without any big plan whatsoever - it has simply been the unintended consequence of our push to a modern industrial age.

If you look at much of the current environmental issues they are consequences of modern agriculture and industrial practices. Surely if man were to occupy Mars using habitable domes then we could happily vent greenhouse gases to our hearts content in a way we wouldn't dream of here on Earth? After a few hundred years temperatures would begin to climb and then things might need to be controlled more closely. But the basic engine of change would have been started already.

It's a bit like that other topic that frequently comes up for discussion - colonisation - one half of the debate says you need 10,000 colonists at a minimum...and the other half argues about this. But North America wasn't colonised by one ship carrying 10,000 people - it was colonised by hundreds of ships carrying a few people each over a period of time. Those people weren't setting out to change the World, but just to improve their own lives. Terraforming isn't necessarily a "one shot" project and needn't be the subject of some overarching plan - but could be the result of large numbers of individual decisions that may have seemed perfectly rational in the context that they were made. Perhaps this could be the explanation for billions of people living on a world with an insidious atmosphere?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by PoorMerchant

Sorry to open up the debate again - but it seems to me that everyone is regarding terraforming as conscious plan to alter a planet to make it habitable for humans. If one looks at Earth much of the current debate about global warming accepts that we have been doing some terraforming already right here without any big plan whatsoever - it has simply been the unintended consequence of our push to a modern industrial age.

If you look at much of the current environmental issues they are consequences of modern agriculture and industrial practices. Surely if man were to occupy Mars using habitable domes then we could happily vent greenhouse gases to our hearts content in a way we wouldn't dream of here on Earth? After a few hundred years temperatures would begin to climb and then things might need to be controlled more closely. But the basic engine of change would have been started already.

It's a bit like that other topic that frequently comes up for discussion - colonisation - one half of the debate says you need 10,000 colonists at a minimum...and the other half argues about this. But North America wasn't colonised by one ship carrying 10,000 people - it was colonised by hundreds of ships carrying a few people each over a period of time. Those people weren't setting out to change the World, but just to improve their own lives. Terraforming isn't necessarily a "one shot" project and needn't be the subject of some overarching plan - but could be the result of large numbers of individual decisions that may have seemed perfectly rational in the context that they were made. Perhaps this could be the explanation for billions of people living on a world with an insidious atmosphere?

Good point

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by PoorMerchant

It's a bit like that other topic that frequently comes up for discussion - colonisation - one half of the debate says you need 10,000 colonists at a minimum...and the other half argues about this. But North America wasn't colonised by one ship carrying 10,000 people - it was colonised by hundreds of ships carrying a few people each over a period of time. Those people weren't setting out to change the World, but just to improve their own lives. Terraforming isn't necessarily a "one shot" project and needn't be the subject of some overarching plan - but could be the result of large numbers of individual decisions that may have seemed perfectly rational in the context that they were made. Perhaps this could be the explanation for billions of people living on a world with an insidious atmosphere?

Nope. Colonizing a world with an insidious atmosphere is just plain nuts. It doesn't get less nuts because you divide the decision among millions of decision makers.

[ak_aramis]

A long-thinking grandstander with excess population might make a make-work project of a terraforming project on a undesirable world. In exactly the same way as the Gulags were used in Soviet Russia, and similar to how the Roads were used by the Romans to keep the Legions busy.

It would also be an excellent way to keep the eco-/bio-warfare division busy without calling them eco-/bio-warfare... because if you can terraform in a lifetime, you can perform massive ecowar, too.

And, once you have a population, if they can at all afford to eat, they are likely to breed, too, and to grow.

On the other hand, with Jump Drives and Big Ships, it's easier to colonize the next system past...

[Malenfant]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

On the other hand, with Jump Drives and Big Ships, it's easier to colonize the next system past...

Which pretty much trumps everything you said earlier in your post.

[PoorMerchant]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Nope. Colonizing a world with an insidious atmosphere is just plain nuts. It doesn't get less nuts because you divide the decision among millions of decision makers.

Perhaps the insidious atmosphere is a result of terraforming gone awry?