There is no space law in this post. It’s mostly about gardening, science fiction, and a request for terraforming reading material suggestions. You have been warned.
I’m working on a prequel series to my Waking Late trilogy. It’s much closer in time to the original settlement of Nwwwlf, and has thus forced me to think about terraforming and how one would bring Earth’s flora, fauna, and microbial infrastructure to a new world to make it a clone of Earth. That was the original plan for the hapless ancestors of my Waking Late characters, who thought they were heading for a terraformed Earth clone. Instead, they are stuck on the wrong planet, one with its own ecology, and only one valley made Earth-friendly. The way I figure it, a couple thousand years from now we’ll have terraforming enterprises that seek out strange new worlds of barren rock and turn them into copies of Mother Terra. The planets with their own life will be saved for study by people in SCAPE suits.
Alas, if you take your starship through a wormhole the wrong way, you can get lost, and the Valerie Hall gets good and lost. Fortunately, this being fiction, the Val finds a semi-hospitable planet and ruthlessly terraforms a small piece of the new world, in violation of all principles of scientific preservation, planetary protection, and the current notion that all life is static. The crew of the Valerie Hall and the emigrants from the WesHem and Mars settle an area the size of the Chiang Mai valley in Thailand–or at least my memory of it–and turn it green.
Many years ago I heard Elon Musk talk at a conference. He had just started SpaceX, and explained that he created his launch company because he’d wanted to send a little greenhouse with a flower to Mars. The expense was daunting, even for him, and he figured that he could bring the price of launch down. He did. He did that and more–flyback boosters, Teslas to Mars, vertical landings, all good.
But I don’t think he meant the flower as a first step in the blossoming of Mars. If memory serves, he meant it as a sign of hope. I have to admit, I found the flyback boosters a better sign of hope myself, but that’s neither here nor there. If we set aside how these giant terraforming companies would get a barren rock ready for terraforming in the first place, I have started to fret about what one would bring from Earth to improve the soil.
I am not an expert gardener. I like gardening, and I know how to water plants and that they need organic matter. It’s been a long learning curve for me. My husband and I bought our first house when I was twenty-nine. It had a nice backyard, but it was almost entirely covered in ivy. I bought some gardening books to read about how to garden. Like Elon Musk, I wanted flowers, although I wanted them in my back yard, not on Mars. After I finished my reading, it became clear to me that I needed to amend the soil–which is clay in Maryland, and not such great stuff–and then plant shrubs for visual structure and only get around to the flowers after all that other stuff was done. So, of course, I planted flowers.
In my defense, I was lazy and wrong. Admittedly, that’s not much of a defense, but let me explain. I was lazy because after meeting up with the roots of the ivy and hacking my way through the clay I found I had cleared very little after hours of labor. This was dispiriting and made me embrace my inner laziness. I had two issues with planting shrubs. First, they were more expensive than bulbs. Second, they wouldn’t look good for years and years, at which point I’d be middle-aged and old and clearly unable to appreciate beauty any longer. This turned out to be wrong, and–spoiler alert–I still appreciate beauty even though I’m now (ahem) arguably middle-aged.
I muddled along like this for a while, eventually planting shrubs, and then finally, after we’d been in the house over ten years, I started working on amending the soil.
As for beauty, despite my advanced age, I have recently planted a dozen mountain laurels. We put down a thick layer of compost and I water them daily. They are finicky creatures. They are native Marylanders who do well in the woods, but have trouble in gardens and yards. I’m hoping the overgrown, brambled, weedy mess that we smothered in the very back of our yard provides the right kind of soil. It is the working theory.
I’m wondering whether to start feeding them compost tea or mycorrhizae fungus. I want them to live. There’s a good argument that although the mycorrhizae fungus pellets are cool and awesome, and the fungus itself spreads for miles underground feeding nutrients to plant roots and exchanging phosporous for carbon and performing other rollicking functions, that the compost tea can give the mountain laurels all that and more.
This has got me thinking about how to bring primordial soup to another planet. These cost-conscious terraformers are not going to pack a starship full of compost tea. That’s a ton of weight, which could be better taken up by freezing paying settlers and placing them in stasis stacked neatly atop each other. How about soil? Would you carry a bunch of dirt? That’s got to be heavy. Earthworms? I am quite excited when I see earth worms in the garden. I don’t try to pet them or anything, but I do appreciate them. Could they, too, survive cryogenic storage, or that staple of interstellar travel–stasis? More importantly, do the bacteria in the guts of people or worms survive? How much primordial soup can a starship carry? And can it be dehydrated? For plot purposes, I want the answer to be yes.
Although I have just written many paragraphs explaining how I got to where I am on this question, I know I’m pretty much nowhere. And I don’t know how to get somewhere. I’ve read up on planetary protection, the principle under which NASA and other space agencies make sure they don’t bring Earth bacteria to other planets and muddy the scientific waters, so to speak. Obviously, this is antithetical to my heretical terraforming plans and not a good resource for how to bring Earth bacteria elsewhere.
I was thinking I’d have to buy some books. So far, I’ve found this book, but it covers such a wide array of topics I worry that the discussion on terraforming might be more general than I need. If anyone has read it, please let me know. Even better, recommend other reading. Otherwise, I’ll be spending time grazing the web.
NB: Martha’s Sons isn’t about terraforming, but terraforming provides a backdrop to the infrastructure. Also, it matters in the third book, which I’m working on now.
Mountain laurel photo credit:
Hi Laura,
I’ve been working on comments to the launch and reentry licensing NPRM related to hybrid vehicles, but I had some thoughts on your question of terraforming. It occurred to me that there are some similarities with the sailing ships of old. They didn’t bring spare parts along in case something broke during the voyage, they brought the necessary raw materials (the ones they couldn’t stop and forage for) and a good shipwright to make whatever they needed. Bringing everything you need, like dirt, is wasteful of space and weight. So, what is the minimum necessary components to make a medium that can grow earth plants and the other bacteria and organisms that are beneficial to productive soil. I just saw today that NASA named several science teams that will be doing research on the soil and regolith of the moon and other bodies like the moons of mars in preparation for future missions. Presumably we are not going to ship groceries to the moon and Mars so colonists there will have to grow their own. NASA may have some research on that already that could be helpful. Maybe your colonists should look to a “dead” moon for raw soil and other terraforming materials rather than trying to kill off the local alien organisms living on a planet. Life is notoriously hard to get rid of, so that may be an easier way to go.
I also read recently “Ender in Exile” by Orion Scott Card, and the colonists in that book were terraforming a planet already partially terraformed by the Formics. Since the people were living in a new biosphere, with alien compounds and organisms that made up or were in the food chain, they had to adjust their own genetics to accommodate. I thought that was an interesting approach, change the human to accommodate living on a new planet rather than changing the whole planet to accommodate us! It would probably be an easier problem to change the genetics of one organism, us, rather than the millions of organisms in a planetary biosphere. With gene editing techniques like CRISPR which are effective on full grown living organisms and which will presumably be much more advanced by the time we have interplanetary space travel, you could just change the human to take advantage of the existing or modified food chain. (Gene editing would also be effective on crop plants for instance to adjust to conditions on a new planet.)
Of course this would come with other considerations like the future mobility of the colonists. If they were genetically altered for living on a particular colony world, would they still be compatible with other human variants of other colony worlds or would they essentially be stuck on their new home planet. Would this cause the human race to splinter?
So like a good shipwright, colonists might want to take necessary raw materials, a good geneticist and a good lab.
These are awesome considerations, Scott. Thanks for sharing your thinking. You are giving me fodder for an origins story, for sure, especially for someone to at least suggest modifying the people.
Also, I’ve decided to reach out to the companies that sell the magical fungus and see how they reduce it to or capture it in pellet form. From what I can tell, you buy it dry, so there might be something there.
In this future universe, generally, yes, the terraformers go to barren worlds without life. However, in my Not What We Were Looking For stories my poor, lost starship has no other recourse than to try to fit a slice of Earth into the world they found.
Thanks for stopping by! It’s always good to hear from you, and, yes, that NPRM is keeping a lot of folks busy, isn’t it?
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