On Creating Imaginary Worlds: Science Fiction

[chrispenycate]

Biochemistry is not just carbon based/silicon based; that sea urchin has tens of thousands of complex chemicals, enzymes and proteins and such, which are identical to yours. If you took one cell from it, and one cell from you, you'd have to be a specialist to spot the difference. We're all cousins, from slime moulds to sequoias.
Alien life might not have gone the DNA route, or chosen another, non-phosphorous, chemical for energy release, and you can make a fair bet we would be mutually inedible.

Trying to get a stable oxygen atmosphere without lifeforms is very difficult, because the stuff is so reactive it keeps getting dragged out of the atmosphere by surface rocks and the like. Heavily volcanic, and some component of the crust which releases oxygen when heated, then reabsorbs slowly as it cools down? But life is the most likely suspect. If you're feeling guilty about - hm, it's about three steps up from genocide, isn't it? The elimination of an entire different path of life - you could make them unicellular, floating in the ocean, never having evolved any further because the lack of a big moon meant no tidal stirring of the core, so no radioactives in the crust, mutation much slower and driven by cosmic rays... it's much more difficult to get worked up about something you can't see without a microscope. Even if the moral principle is identical.

How critical are soil bacteria, microorganisms, worms? I don't know, and I doubt whether anyone else does, really. But in releasing trace elements in soluble form (so plants can access them) almost certainly important enough that it is much simpler to use them than try and synthesise all the components required for healthy growth. And compost breeds fast, although its capacity for self-spreading is a lot slower. Why don't you like it? Too unpredictable an ecology, or likely (almost certain) to contain microrganisms that will cause human disease? It's likely the colonists would have tolive a couple of years on hydroponics and stores brought in with them for a couple of years, anyway, before becoming self sufficient, so why reject the tried and successful boitechnology (oh, and where do the colonists come from; asteroid habitats, or did they cart up a load of real farmers from Earth, and let them get massively frustrated on the clean, sterile environment on the ship during transit (or deep freeze them?)

Probably the easiest would be to start out on an island, the size of Eire, say. and feed your sewage out where you need topsoil installing, and worry about 'conquering the planet' when yourpopulation pressures start to show; quite a few generations later.

 

[clorky]

The reason I am wary about the compost idea is mostly of narrative reasons. Because, while I want this game to be ground-breaking in terms of realism, I don't want to turn people off or the game to feel comical by making a large part of the resource management gameplay concern itself with messy things like compost and sewage. Producing nitrogen fertilizer from the air is a lot more palatable...

Still, plopping down seeds in the ground and expecting them to grow right away after just clearing the area (which only removes above-ground plant life) might not feel realistic.
I am thinking instead of a way for the colonists to prepare the ground and convert the soil away from the alien lifeforms by planting certain hardy weed-like plants on the cleared ground. After growing these for a few seasons combined with aggressive pest control I am thinking the soil will be sufficiently friendly for earth crops.

I see your point that it would not be expected that two life strands without common ancestors could derive noursihment from each other. But if the alien life is wholly uninterested in the colonists' crops and cattle, wouldn't it be boring? There would be no conflict, no moral dilemmas about killing vs. preserving the aliens.

 

[chrispenycate]

It's been a long time I've been meaning to post this, but continued enlarging it. Perhaps the original questioner has already give up and gone home.

Never mind; perhaps it will interest someone else.


But terraforming is all about developing a self-sustaining, planet-spanning ecology which will continue to expand without human assistance. It's no use having trees in pots that need nutrient solution pumped to them to survive; there have to be bacteria and fungi breaking down vegetable waste, releasing valuable compounds into the substrate that will soon become soil. No robots with camel-hair brushes pollinating flowers; a range if insects, bees, butterflies; not because they're pretty, but self replacing and, in a way, symbiotic.

Now, rather than calculate the mix needed to generate a balance – so many predators needed to stop the herbivores breeding themselves into starvation, this kind of grub cultures so and so bacteria in its gut, so many parasites to do whatever parasites are useful for – far easier to scoop up a working ecology in the traditional 'compost heap' technique, used by farmers from time definitely immemorial (to distinguish – or possibly extinguish – them from the 'burn everything and plant in the ashes' style of agriculturist)

That way you don't have to understand all the processes going on, you just assume they'll find their own balance through long experience.

If you don't like my generation ship flying compost heap you can go high tech and carry ennucleated cells into which you install the genes for all the organisms necessary, or analyse all the life in a cubic metre of fertile soil, but I strongly advise doing a test run on some sterile asteroid dust before trusting your future existence to it.

And humans will have to be part of the overall balance. I'm sorry you find human waste products disagreeable, but they exist, and correctly used can accelerate the process considerably. If you're using robots to terraform (not necessarily humanoid robots, any machine with enough inbuilt problem solving ability to not require humans overseeing them all the time) you don't need any vertebrates at all, but if the terraforming proceeds parallel to colonisation those wastes are valuable raw material.

Obviously I'd like deer and rabbits, ocelots and songbirds, but these would have to be released after a century or so, when the low-level equilibrium is established.

You might have to genetically modify some species, particularly if some chemical (elemental or complex) exists in large quantities, or is lacking. For that matter, you might genemod your colonists. It wouldn't take much of an excess of mercury or arsenic to make it unhealthy for Earthborn humans.

On the other hand you might be able to breed organisms (from your imported stock or the planet's lifepool) to concentrate and immobilise the poisons, or concentrate and render available compounds in short supply, particularly if there was a religious injunction against modifications of the human genome.

Native species would be competing with invaders for resources, even if they weren't preying on them directly. If this isn't food, it might well be the elements that make up food. Or water, or sunlight. The home team has the advantage of knowing the terrain, and numbers. The visitors have technology, intelligence and analytic capacity.

My terraformers are up against passive resistance: an atmosphere they won't be able to breathe for a couple of centuries, land coverage which is rock, sand or clay, lifeless oceans, and the certainty that, as the atmosphere changes it's going to instigate some fairly severe weather. Your colonists will be able to breathe straight off, and don't want to change atmospheric composition much, but are against active opposition; a biosphere that is not going to give in easily simply because it's life, and life which survives is that which never gives in.

I don't know who has it easier, Maybe the only way of releasing the vital resorces locked up in local lifeforms is by burning them; alternatively, Earthly bacteria might be able to rot them, in which case we can expect local bacteria equivalents to attack Earthlife, probably indicating a common origin, and Ahrenian spores transported to anywhere life might establish a foothold.

 

[zachariah]

Drop a few cane toads in and they'll sort it out for you.

 

[RVM45]

Guys, back to some of the really neat stuff at the beginning of the thread:

#1} Could we imagine an alternate solar system where instead of a moon; Venus and Earth revolve around each other, at just the right distance to give Earth the same tides that it has now? And further suppose that intellegent life started on both Planets about the same time. Concievably, they could have been communicating for generations; even centuries before space travel became possible.

#2} IF I remember correctly, about one tenth the size of our Sun is about as small as a sun could possibly be--a tiny red dwarf. What if Jupiter were such a Sun; and Saturn too; and stick another one out about Pluto's orbit.

Move all the moons back far enough from the Suns Jupiter and Saturn to get them (the planets) into the Goldilocks Zone.

A tiny red dwarf at Jupiter's orbit would affect us very little. One at Saturn, even less. They say that the Sun would just be a rather bright star from Pluto--so a red dwarf out where Pluto is; wouldn't even be terribly bright.

Oh yeah, any gas giant moons that are mostly ice and methane--in our alternate Solar system, they're rock...

You should be able to have a whole bunch of "Shirt-Sleeved Worlds" in such a solar system.

Yes, by Chaos theory, such differences would have made Earth following a parallel path of development highly unlikely--but just for the sake of argument--lets say that it did...

Gotta go, more later...

.....RVM45

 

[Primitius]

hey guys, I'm new here and have a pressing question.
Consider that the world has been wiped out by floods, leaving only high-altitude areas above ground. If most of humanity is killed off, how much land would need too have survived to be able to retain all of the previous aspects of the 'old world', specifically technological and scientific knowledge and capabilities?
a whole country? the whole of the west??

 

[chrispenycate]

It all depends what you mean by "capabilities". You could kill off 90% of humanity, flood almost all of the major population centres, and the actual stored knowledge would change by quite a small factor. Of course, reclaiming this knowledge and putting it into a format that would continue to be accessible after the world's computer park ground to a halt would be considerably more complex, particularly with the tendency toward small, isolated colonies with a minimum of communication between them (You don't think the Web's going to survive that waterlogging)

Industrial capacity, the means to use the knowledge for something is traditionally concentrated round river valleys, originally for transportation of raw materials and finished goods, and for the available water needed in so many industrial processes, later because the cities were there, the workforce was there, the practical know-how was there. Now, there are a few high altitude cities with some industry (like Geneva, where I am) and careful triage of your massive migratory refugee population might get you the essential workers to expand (as long as you can feed them, house them and stop them killing each other) but, even though you only need a fraction of our present population to run the largely automated, roboticised modern factories, those factories would be largely under water, and building new ones would have to take second place behind the flooded granaries and deep freezes, the traditional human occupations of food, shelter and protection.

 

[clorky]

Hi chrispenycate, just saw your new reply. I am still pondering this issue, and will read through your points more carefully and hopefully post what I come up with.

In the meantime, I just want to post that it has come to my attention that amino acids are regularly found formed in physical processes around the universe:
(google "amino acids in space")
This would make it a lot likelier that any alien life is built on the same amino acid building blocks as earth life, and in turn make it likelier that they are able to feed on each other. This would be likelier from the predator level right down to the microorganism level.
So that gives me heart that my premise of interacting earth and alien life is a lot less far-fetched.

 

[zachariah]

So when do we get to meet the green-skinned girls?

 

[clorky]

The way I see it, compost would not be necessary for growing plants. This is why hydroponics is possible after all - plants don't need soil, they only need the correct nutrition. And this can be provided as fertilizer in soil also.

No, the primary purpose of the compost would be to introduce the organisms able to decompose organic matter of Earth origin (detrivores). The purpose of this would be to complete the various nutrient cycles.
If we presume that the two ecosystems cannot feed on each other, then any un-harvested Earth plants would just lay on the surface after they died. And Earth plants would probably need fertilization to survive, as they would most likely rely on the nitrate output of specific organisms in the nitrogen cycle which may not have an equal in the alien ecology.

But once the earth organisms were introduced, I don't see why they couldn't exist side by side with the alien lifeforms. Each would be responsible for decomposing their own side's material, just as happens on Earth, where different detrivores specialize in different compounds. They wouldn't have to displace each other, instead, a new ecology would form based on a happy mixture.

If I decide on the idea that the organisms can feed on each other, then in addition to this parallel ecology, the cycle of carbon, nitrogen etc. could just as well be interleaved and go through a mixture of alien and earth life.

Also, I think you are a bit pessimistic in the timeframes you give for spreading the ecology. I think that many lifeforms will rapidly colonize a new area given the opportunity. That is what happens on earth after all.

Lastly, I think you have a good point on the importance of insects and bees to Earth plants. They would have to bred by the colonists for their agriculture to be succesful.

 

[chrispenycate]

Lifeforms colonising an Earthly environment have always an established environment they are moving into. How long it took life to saturate Earth, we don't know; it could have been billions of years. It had them available. Organisms had time to evolve into the available niches. OK, with my reducing atmosphere I'm seriously short of mobile creatures to spread the bounty, while you can dump bee hives and ant nests along with plant seeds, but I'm looking at some four hundred years before there can be insects in the open and crabs in the sea (the aquatic environment goes slightly faster) and over a thousand before humans can go out without masks. A planet is a big thing. And even on the surface of a planet, if you clean an area of some species – say Tsetse, as it happens to be a problem I'm involved with – it is not refilled at the speed the things can fly in, but less than a thousandth of that; like a gas diffusion.

Starting with a breathable atmosphere, you can start with a small area, and expand as time goes on. Which is fine; how many people are you going to want to lodge, anyway? A convoy carrying a million people and tools and seed and all the things that are going to be needed to make this project viable is going to be enormous, and the price of it cripple the economy of the planet that equips it, even if you deep-freeze them and thaw them out as needed; far more likely a hundred thousand. And look at how small a percentage of a planetary surface is required to lodge and feed that.

There is no need for really tight schedules. The main job will be classifying native species, and picking out the ones who are dangerous to one phase or another of the invasion; directly to humans, less directly via their essential organisms or some essential compound that is in short supply.

 

[Hilarious Joke]

Or you could use embryo space colonization, perhaps?

 

[MattyK]

Hi all!

I'm a new member (you can probably tell this from my post count and join date!) and I was looking for a forum where I could bounce around a few ideas and ask some theoretical questions as I'm planning on writing a sci-fi story and while I don't expect much from it at the moment (it's still in VERY early stages), I want to be as accurate as possible when describing what's happening.

One of the possible central themes for the story is the terraformation of Mars (or lack of, in my story's case). I've glimpsed a bit about the subject on Wikipedia (obviously not the most reliable source of information but I'll take it's word for it this time) but was hoping to confirm what I'd already heard and see if I've missed anything.

A summary of what I've read so far:

• The surface temperature being what it is, giant reflectors would need to be placed in orbit to reflect the sun's rays and warm up the surface.
• Large amounts of ice (from comets/ice moons) would need to be placed/crashed on the surface to create surface water which would be necessary for building an atmosphere.

An additional idea I had would be the construction of giant glass domes housing huge gardens that, when the outside atmosphere was ready, would be broken open so the plantlife would sustain a breathable atmosphere.

I'm assuming there's a hell of a lot of science missing here (there were bits in the article I read that made me wonder if it was still actually written in English) but it the basic theory sound/is there anything missing? Also, what sort of timescale could this be achieved in? (set centuries in the future so any technological constraints can be worked around).

That's it for now, have a few more ideas for the story and characters but none that require outside input! Sorry of this topic has been posted before and I've missed it. It's a big forum and I've only just started looking around!

 

[The Judge]

Hi MattyK and Welcome to the Chronicles!

I can't help you with the science as such - to paraphrase Bill Bryson, I have difficulty understanding how electricity doesn't leak out of unoccupied sockets. But I have read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars which is about the colonisation of the planet. I think there are at least two others in the series as well. I didn't like it as a book, but the science is, I believe, plausible - certainly it reads as very realistic. I think it would be an idea for you to get hold of a copy, and not just for an insight into how he thinks the problems would be overcome. While your story would undoubtedly be very different, it might stop you spending time and effort on a plot which is too similar.

Hope this helps. And welcome again.

J

 

[chrispenycate]

Hi, MK.

Have you read the Kim Stanley Robinson "Red Mars", "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars" books? You don't dare write a book about terraforming Mars without having done so (and I thought they were a great read, too; come to think of it I think my copies are in South Yorkshire)

Yes, adding volatiles – water, obviously, but nitrous oxides and carbon dioxide too, methane if you can find it outside a gravity well, all the sort of things you can find in comets – would add to your greenhouse effect and the infall energy will help to warm the place up punctually (nice to find a place so chilly that dropping dry ice on it warms it up. Probably several hundred megatonnes; more would be nice. But do it before you start building domes; the weather is going to be interesting for some time, probably preventing landing for some years; inconvenient if you've got colonists already in place.

I'd certainly leave a couple of centuries to do the job, preferably five; a planet is a big place, even if it looks very small in the telescope. Even those mirrors are not simple to place and stabilise; there's no stable way to keep them edge on while they're between you and the sun, and reflecting the light back to the planet when they're behind it. You need to keep tinkering with it permanently. Maybe just energy, though, with no reaction mass required, spun up for mechanical stability and to become their own gyroscopes…

And the worst is, just as you're getting a breathable atmosphere it reduces the greenhouse effect and lets more heat out into space.

How about building a series of orbital fusion plants collecting hydrogen from the solar wind and beaming power down to the planetary surface (yes, quite a lot of power, but every little gigawatt-hour helps a little.)

Hello, Judge; you weren't there when I started typing.

Which either goes to show great minds think similarly, or that I need to learn to type faster.

 

[The Judge]

Hello Chris - of course it's a question of great minds! (Even if only one of the minds knows what he's talking about when it comes to scientific-y thingies...)

J

 

[MattyK]

Hi Guys!

Thanks for the welcome and thanks for the info and book recommendation. The Mars trilogy is one I first heard about years ago and decided I wanted to read and then somehow I totally forgot about it...Amazon here I come!

I'm not even sure at this point how much of a central theme the Mars terraforming idea would take, I don't even have a plot yet! This was just an idea that occured that I thought I could build around.

Any way, lots more reading to do and ideas to write down. I'm sure I'll be back at some point with more questions!

Thanks again

 

[ktabic]

And yet another person mentioning Red|Green|Blue Mars.

 

[J-WO]

Domes feature in a lot of Colonized Mars tales (books or film), but I never understand why they don't just put a glass roof on top of a canyon. Surely that would be easier/cheaper? Or am I missing something?

 

[chrispenycate]

A roofed over canyon should do fine, although I'm not sure it's less work than an essentially prefabricated dome. You might have to plasticise the walls, though; oxygen is a very active gas, and the rocks could absorb many tons of it before reaching equilibrium. (think how practically all Earth's surface rocks contain oxygen, while there has only been free oxygen since life released it) You could even go for an underground cave system, with the same limitations, and requiring a local energy source (for light for your plants. Better shielding from whatever cosmic radiation is not blocked by this thinner atmosphere, easier thermal insulation, protection from sandstorms.