01-25-2015, 01:37 PM | #11 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
No. It will precipitate abiotically, and in deep water it will do so in bulk.
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01-25-2015, 01:40 PM | #12 |
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
I don't think that's quite right. You don't want to create a set of biomes dominated by the rapid accumulation of fuel loads and periodic sterilising wildfire. The main action in sequestering carbon and generating oxygen is going on in the top few millimetres of the oceans. On land, the big story is forming soil.
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01-25-2015, 01:49 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
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For ex, on the older ones, the fossil record is weird, as you get into older rocks, you come to the Discontinuity, where the former environment was replaced. Younger rocks more-or-less like Earth, older ones often very, very different, and no traces of biological activities below the local Discontinuity. None. Zero. Zip. Sometimes the Discontinuity is really odd, if the former environment was particularly alien. The biospheres are complicated, too, by the fact that the aliens sometimes introduce new forms from other worlds later, so you find entire families of fossils that seem to appear from nowhere, with intermediate forms within that family but nothing necessarily linking them to other groups of organisms. This goes down to the cellular level. The aliens did this for experimental reasons, and sometimes introduced new species and groups of species just to see what would happen, including humans when we evolved on Earth. The result is doubly strange when those humans start developing civilizations, and try to make sense of their surroundings. For ex, there's a world in my universe where humans (actually near-humans) are the only placental mammals on the planet. There is an are immense thriving ecosystem with marsupials in most of the typical 'mammalian' niches, but no placentals anywhere other than Man. But the same star also has another terraformed world which not only has placental mammal species present, but various apes and monkeys. So imagine the shock of the sapients when they first visited their neighboring world... |
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01-25-2015, 01:52 PM | #14 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
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Here's a thought: a terraformed world might be very short of good-quality iron deposits, though. It's widely thought that Earth's iron ore is largely of biotic origin. Absent life, what might precipitate iron out of the oceans into useful form (assuming there were oceans). Absent oceans, what abiotic processes might produce useful iron ore? |
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01-25-2015, 02:13 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
Because of those hills of travertine in Turkey, right?
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01-25-2015, 04:32 PM | #16 |
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
Evolution can only work with what it's given. If you only have mammals, for example, I doubt you'll ever get endo-parasites in under 200 million years.
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01-25-2015, 04:41 PM | #17 | |
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
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There is life that can reduce Fe III, so runaway O2 disasters aren't inevitable. My alien world evolved a branch of photosynthesizing methanogenic lithotrophic oxygen tolerating life that limped along with the more classic aerobic heterotrophs. A few well placed disasters and a low oxygen atmosphere helped them to take over the planet leaving animal-like life amoeboid.
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01-25-2015, 04:52 PM | #18 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
Only mammals and neither bacteria nor archaea? Not even as intestinal flora and decay organisms? No mycorrhizal fungi? It doesn't sound like a very plausible starting-point for anything.
Your general point is true enough — evolution has to work with what it has to start with — but I reckon that any set of biomes designed for terraformation is bound to include organisms that are only a short jump away from re-specialising as pathogens and parasites.
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01-25-2015, 04:58 PM | #19 | |
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
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Good point about fungi. Those dietarily non-discriminating bastards are always finding novel ways to consume the still living. I think if anything could infect visiting alien life it would be fungi.
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01-25-2015, 05:10 PM | #20 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Terraformed Ecosystem Peculiarities
Not only is pedogenesis a key goal of terraforming in itself, but also more carbon is stored in soil than in [living] plants.
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bio-tech, biology, ecology, ecosystems, terraforming |
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