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There is no space law in this post.\u00a0 It’s mostly about gardening, science fiction, and a request for terraforming reading material suggestions.\u00a0 You have been warned.<\/p>\nThere is no space law in this post.\u00a0 It’s mostly about gardening, science fiction, and a request for terraforming reading material suggestions.\u00a0 You have been warned.<\/p>\n
I’m working on a prequel series to my Waking Late<\/strong><\/a> trilogy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That was the original plan for the hapless ancestors of my Waking Late characters, who thought they were heading for a terraformed Earth clone.\u00a0 Instead, they are stuck on the wrong planet, one with its own ecology, and only one valley made Earth-friendly.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The planets with their own life will be saved for study by people in SCAPE suits.<\/p>\n Alas, if you take your starship through a wormhole the wrong way, you can get lost, and the Valerie Hall<\/em> gets good and lost.\u00a0 Fortunately, this being fiction, the Val<\/em> 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.\u00a0 The crew of the Valerie Hall<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n Many years ago I heard Elon Musk talk at a conference.\u00a0 He had just started SpaceX, and explained that he created his launch company\u00a0 because he’d wanted to send a little greenhouse with a flower to Mars.\u00a0 The expense was daunting, even for him, and he figured that he could bring the price of launch down.\u00a0 He did.\u00a0 He did that and more–flyback boosters, Teslas to Mars, vertical landings, all good.<\/p>\n But I don’t think he meant the flower as a first step in the blossoming of Mars.\u00a0 If memory serves, he meant it as a sign of hope.\u00a0 I have to admit, I found the flyback boosters a better sign of hope myself, but that’s neither here nor there.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I am not an expert gardener.\u00a0 I like gardening, and I know how to water plants and that they need organic matter.\u00a0 It’s been a long learning curve for me.\u00a0 My husband and I bought our first house when I was twenty-nine.\u00a0 It had a nice backyard, but it was almost entirely covered in ivy.\u00a0 I bought some gardening books to read about how to garden.\u00a0 Like Elon Musk, I wanted flowers, although I wanted them in my back yard, not on Mars.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So, of course, I planted flowers.<\/p>\n In my defense, I was lazy and wrong.\u00a0 Admittedly, that’s not much of a defense, but let me explain.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This was dispiriting and made me embrace my inner laziness.\u00a0\u00a0 I had two issues with planting shrubs.\u00a0 First, they were more expensive than bulbs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This turned out to be wrong, and–spoiler alert–I still appreciate beauty even though I’m now (ahem) arguably middle-aged.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As for beauty, despite my advanced age, I have recently planted a dozen mountain laurels.\u00a0 We put down a thick layer of compost and I water them daily.\u00a0 They are finicky creatures.\u00a0 They are native Marylanders who do well in the woods, but have trouble in gardens and yards.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I’m wondering whether to start feeding them compost tea or mycorrhizae fungus.\u00a0 I want them to live.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n This has got me thinking about how to bring primordial soup to another planet.\u00a0 These cost-conscious terraformers are not going to pack a starship full of compost tea.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 How about soil?\u00a0 Would you carry a bunch of dirt?\u00a0 That’s got to be heavy.\u00a0 Earthworms? I am quite excited when I see earth worms in the garden.\u00a0 I don’t try to pet them or anything, but I do appreciate them.\u00a0 Could they, too, survive cryogenic storage, or that staple of interstellar travel–stasis?\u00a0 More importantly, do the bacteria in the guts of people or worms survive?\u00a0 How much primordial soup can a starship carry?\u00a0 And can it be dehydrated?\u00a0 For plot purposes, I want the answer to be yes.<\/p>\n Although I have just written many paragraphs explaining how I got to where I am on this question, I know\u00a0 I’m pretty much nowhere.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I don’t know how to get somewhere.\u00a0 I’ve read up on planetary protection, the principle under which NASA and other space agencies make sure they don’t<\/em> bring Earth bacteria to other planets and muddy the scientific waters, so to speak.\u00a0 Obviously, this is antithetical to my heretical terraforming plans and not a good resource for how to bring Earth bacteria elsewhere.<\/p>\n I was thinking I’d have to buy some books.\u00a0 So far, I’ve found this book<\/strong><\/a>, but it covers such a wide array of topics I worry that the discussion on terraforming might be more general than I need.\u00a0 If anyone has read it, please let me know.\u00a0 Even better, recommend other reading.\u00a0 Otherwise, I’ll be spending time grazing the web.<\/p>\n NB:\u00a0 Martha’s Sons<\/strong><\/a> isn’t about terraforming, but terraforming\u00a0 provides a backdrop to the infrastructure.\u00a0 Also, it matters in the third book, which I’m working on now.<\/p>\n Mountain laurel photo credit:\u00a0 Image by zrefugee<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is no space law in this post.\u00a0 It’s mostly about gardening, science fiction, and a request for terraforming reading…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n