Terraforming in the OTU

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I agree. 'Bells and whistles' projects are not truly important to the people who have undertaken them. If they become ridiculously expensive, they will probably be abandoned.
If he had written 'hearts and souls', I might see it otherwise.

Very well. Hearts and souls. The point remains.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by dwightemarsh

My understanding is that governments that span more than one star system are not legal in the Imperium.

Multi-system governments are not illegal. There are many canonical examples of worlds owned by other worlds. Any interstellar corporation that owns more than one world is also a multi-world government of a sort. The Vegan Autonomous District is a rather big multi-world government. There are no canonical examples, but there's no reason why similar smaller (less than subsector-sized) autonomous districts should not exist. It's even conceivable that an entire duchy could have entered the Imperium en bloc and been given a special charter with extraordinary autonomy.

It's probably reasonable to believe that the Imperium dislike multi-world governments and encourage their breakup as a matter of policy, but they're definitely not illegal.

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?

If a system is suffering from population pressure, it must be failing to control its population growth, and if it's not controlling its population growth, emigration is a horrendously expensive and most probably ultimately futile remedy.


Hans

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Very well. Hearts and souls. The point remains.

Well, if it's as important as 'hearts and souls' they might ignore economic good sense. That doesn't mean it will work out well, though.

[Johnny1A.2]

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.

The standard assumption in the OTU seems to be that people (and/or Ancients) are phenomenally stupid and irrational.

'Rational' is a relative thing. An action is rational or irrational depending on the underlying motive, and motives can be nearly infinitely various. Just for a single real-world example, imagine a (technologically) primitive tribesman from a Bronze Age tribe, contemplating Mount Rushmore.

In one sense it's fully familiar, a monument to the tribal king might be completely part of his frame of reference. But the scale of it! It's totally irrational, it would require the effort of the entire tribe to the exclusion of all else for years on end if it could be done at all (which it could not, at is tech level). No sane tribe would carve a mountain into such a thing, when there are so many easier, cheaper ways to make a monument.

Motives don't have to make sense to anyone else, esp. once resources reach a certain level.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

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.

All true, and none of it necessarily relevant. As we noted in the previous thread, there was plenty of room in England at the time of the settlement of New England and Virginia, too, and certainly plenty of room in Europe. The amount of room available at home has only conditional relevance to the search for more living space.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

'Rational' is a relative thing. An action is rational or irrational depending on the underlying motive, and motives can be nearly infinitely various. Just for a single real-world example, imagine a (technologically) primitive tribesman from a Bronze Age tribe, contemplating Mount Rushmore.

Hell, imagine Combatmedic contemplating Mt Rushmore.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

All true, and none of it necessarily relevant. As we noted in the previous thread, there was plenty of room in England at the time of the settlement of New England and Virginia, too, and certainly plenty of room in Europe. The amount of room available at home has only conditional relevance to the search for more living space.

Months at sea for a relatively few malcontents is not in the same ballpark as a concerted effort of a global economy over centuries no matter the possible end result.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Hell, imagine Combatmedic contemplating Mt Rushmore.

I consider it a waste of good dynamite. But we assume the use of really high tech to make terraforming take centuries. Reasonable estimates would put it at thousands of years at least.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

All true, and none of it necessarily relevant. As we noted in the previous thread, there was plenty of room in England at the time of the settlement of New England and Virginia, too, and certainly plenty of room in Europe. The amount of room available at home has only conditional relevance to the search for more living space.

Yes, but no one had to terraform Virginia or New England, dude.

:)

You keep skipping that bit, Johhny.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Months at sea for a relatively few malcontents is not in the same ballpark as a concerted effort of a global economy over centuries no matter the possible end result.

Yup, Flyn hath spoken wisely.