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#141 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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How does the energy requirement compare with that of compressing the atmosphere into tanks and hauling it away to be replaced, or with running the entire atmosphere through a hard-tech fusion-powered chemical engineering plant? If the terraformers can do all this extravagant ****, are they going to be bothering with algal mats at all?
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 01-30-2015 at 06:08 AM. |
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#142 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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But yes, if you have huge energy expenditures, there are lot of things you can do. The iceball trick is frankly probably something you'd do at the beginning if you were working with a planet you just added volatiles by crashing a pervious comet into it.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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#143 | |
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: The plutonium rich regions of Washington State
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Luke |
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#145 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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I believe so -- volcanic ash tends to be stupendously fertile. The 'heavy organics' tend to be a major component of eruptions
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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#146 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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I actually suspect that a real terraforming operation will involve both mechanical and biological approaches, in tandem. Biology offers replication, if you aren't able to build von Neumann microbots and nanobots as small as algae cells, then the reproductive ability of algae and biological systems offers leverage. They can also do a lot with on-site materials. But at the same time there's no reason you wouldn't use brute-force and subtle machine approaches at the same time. If your long-term goal is a self-sustaining habitable world, one that maintains itself that way on an open-ended basis, there might be advantages to going more biological earlier, to give the system time to evolve itself, to make the tweaks you need to make, to let the various elements adjust to each other and take up their places in the system. You wouldn't want to have a world that looks ready, but have the whole ecosystem collapse when you turn off the big air factory or whatever machines because you overlooked some tiny but important detail of the biological side. |
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Tags |
bio-tech, biology, ecology, ecosystems, terraforming |
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