My foray through Lois McMaster Bujold’s backlist on my site—a foray nowhere near as detailed as Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer’s ongoing reread—reached Komarr recently. One of the elements of the setting impressed me: Bujold’s handling of the centuries-long effort to terraform the planet.
Terraforming is, of course, the hypothesized art of converting an uninhabitable rock into a habitable world. Jack Williamson coined the term in his Seetee-related short story, “Collision Orbit”, published under the pen name Will Stewart in the July, 1942 issue of Astounding Magazine. While Williamson invokes non-existent super-science in order to make the task seem doable, he probably felt confident that terraforming would someday make sense. In the short run, we have seen humans shaping the Earth. In the long run—well, Earth was once an anoxic wasteland. Eons of life shaped it into a habitable planet. Williamson suspected that humans could imitate that process elsewhere…and make it happen in centuries rather than eons. Perhaps in even less time!
Other SF authors picked up the notion and ran with it. It had become clear that Mars and Venus were hellworlds, not the near-Earths of earlier planetary romances. Perhaps the planetary romance could be recuperated if Mars and Venus could be terraformed? And if we made it out of the solar system and found a bunch of new inhospitable planets… well, we could fix those, too.
Back in the 1970s, SF fans could read reassuring articles like Jerry Pournelle’s “The Big Rain,” which proposed terraforming Venus. Invest a hundred billion dollars (half a trillion in modern dollars) and wait a couple of decades. Voila! A habitable planet. We’d be stupid not to do it!
Of course, it’s never as easy in real life as it is in the SF magazines, which is why pretty much none of the Disco Era predictions of crewed space exploration panned out. Though they did produce some pretty art.
Venus can’t be terraformed as easily as Pournelle supposed, in part because he was drawing on a 1961 paper by Carl Sagan—by 1975 it was clear that Sagan had underestimated the extreme hellaciousness of Venus. Also, Pournelle’s estimate that it would take twenty years to do the job turned out to be, um, a smidge too optimistic. Even if all the sunlight hitting Venus could be used to crack carbon dioxide, it would take much, much longer than twenty years to do all the cracking necessary1 . Algae isn’t 100% efficient. The process would sputter to a stop long before Venus became the planet-sized bomb I describe in the footnote below.
This should not be surprising. After all, it took well over two billion years for oxygen-producing organisms to produce a breathable atmosphere on Earth. Granted, nature wasn’t trying to produce a breathable atmosphere. It just sort of wobbled in that direction over billions of years. Directed effort should—well, might—be able to knock a few zeroes off that time frame. Lamentably, “incredibly fast on a geological scale” still translates into pretty goddamn slow as humans measure time2 .
Komarr—remember I mentioned Komarr at the beginning?—acknowledges the time issue. Komarr is a lot closer to being habitable than any world in our solar system, but the people who settled it have invested vast sums as well as centuries of effort and the place is still far from being anywhere close to Earth Mark II. Or even Leigh Brackett’s Mars Mark II. It’s even possible that Komarr will never be successfully terraformed, and that better uses for the money will be found long before Komarr ever gets close to being as pleasant as Precambrian Earth.
Although all too many SF authors handwave fast, easy terraforming, Bujold isn’t alone in recognizing the scale of the problem.
Williamson’s aforementioned “Collision Orbit” only mentions terraforming in passing, but it’s clear from passages like—
Pallas, capital of all the Mandate, was not yet completely terraformed—although the city and a score of mining centers had their own paragravity units a few miles beneath the surface, there was as yet no peegee installation at the center of gravity.
—that despite being armed with super-scientific paragravity, transforming small worlds into living planets is a monumental task even for governments.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s3 “Crucifixus Etiam” embraces the magnitude of the effort to turn an implausibly benign Mars4 into a new home for humans. He imagines this as a sink for the economic surplus that might otherwise undermine the global economy. It’s essentially Europe’s cathedral projects re-imagined on a vastly greater stage: a project that will take eight centuries.
Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Venus’ Children) imagines a near-magic technology that can deal with Venus’ spin (or lack thereof5 ). The author does acknowledge that even with super-science, the project would be the work of generations, and the people who set the effort in motion would not live to see project’s end.
If one consults an actual scientist (using Martyn Fogg’s Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, for example), one learns that the time scales required for the creation of Garden Worlds6 might range from “The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer” to “The Average Lifespan of a Vertebrate Species.” Depressing, yeah? Has any organized human group effort lasted as long as The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer? Certainly not for The Average Lifespan of a Vertebrate Species.
One unorganized human effort, Australian Aboriginal Fire-Stick Farming (which reshaped an entire continent’s ecology), appears to be a serious contender for The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer, if not longer. Perhaps that should give us hope. And perhaps it’s not unreasonable for SF authors to explore what sort of cultures could successfully carry out terraforming projects of realistic duration.
Originally published in August 2018.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]At the end of which you would have a mostly-O2 atmosphere on top of bone-dry carbon dunes. It would be wise to discourage smoking among any colonists.
[2]Just look at how long it took the combined might of Earth’s industrial nations to crank up the CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere from 280 ppm to 400 ppm. I am as enthusiastic as the next person about seeing if we can pull off a remake of the Carnian Pluvial Event, but I fear I may not live to see this glorious experiment’s conclusion.
[3]Better known for A Canticle for Leibowitz, which also features a global effort to radically alter a world’s habitability.
[4]Mars seems to be revealed as more hostile every time we look at it. A recent paper suggests terraforming the place with local resources just cannot be done. Cue gnashing of teeth from Elon Musk.
[5]Spinning Venus from its current hilari-stupid rotation rate to one with a night less than months long requires enough energy to melt the crust of the planet. Which would be counter-productive.
[6]Fogg does suggest that Mars (as it was thought to be in the 1990s) could be transformed from a world that would kill a naked human in a few minutes to one that would kill a naked human in a few minutes in a very slightly different way. That amount of terraforming progress would take a mere 200 years. But his guesstimate was based on an outdated model of Mars; see footnote 4.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin has humans terraform Mars in a few years (Obi-Wan mode on) “from a certain point of view.”
“Has any organized human group effort lasted as long as The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer?”
Uh, beer brewers have, for sure :D
If you built a planet sized shell around Venus (not going to ask if, even assuming infinite resources to work with, it’s possible. I just know it’s easier to imagine than trying to change how fast a planet rotates), you could transfer the light from one side while making it dark on the other (reflectors and, uh, stuff. Lots of stuff).
With that, you could get to Venus Terraforming step one: Get the temperature even on both sides of the planet and reduce the temperature extremes that help create the constant, hurricane force winds (actually, winds that make hurricanes look like gentle breezes, but we don’t have a word for them).
Maybe you’d just want a constant temperature around the whole planet. Maybe that would make the winds manageable, but you know about the difference between theory and actual practice.
I must admit this sort of thing always makes me think of Green Mountain on Ascension Island: Green Mountain
It also reminds me of the point that biodiversity in North America and (especially) Great Britain is higher now than in 1492, because the number of introduced species is much greater than the number that have gone locally extinct: The New Wild
Perhaps terraforming would be possible if, at every stage, making the place slightly more habitable seemed worth the effort. After all, we have been irrigating deserts for thousands of years, and have not given up yet.
Beer brewing is not a single group effort. If there were a project to brew the Ultimate Beer which some forward-thinking person started back in ancient Mesopotamia (or wherever) and which had continued to this day, that would count.
The problem of terraforming and the vast times it takes are EXACTLY the probems I have been thinking about in my SciFi writing. Mars would require huge transfers of gasses and water from the outer system. Venus has too much CO2 that if converted to O2 and sequestered carbon would still not provide a habitable surface… not to mention anytime an atmosphere has greater than 30% O2 it is as Mr. Nicoll, a firebomb.
The problem then comes down to selection. Is there a world that we can bio-terraform? Likely there are, out in other star systems. One would search for a world with just the right amount of N2 and CO2 that when converted by engineered organisms, leaves the atmosphere in a range of total and partial pressures / temps. such that common terrestrial life can thrive.
The second problem mentioned is that of time… and how long it would take. Let’s look at what Earth’s biosphere TODAY (not it’s evolutionary past) could do? It would take around 2,000 years to pump out the same mass of O2 that Earth has today. Engineered organisms probably could NOT do it much faster.
So lets assume we have a long range program of seeding the stars with terrestrial life, including humans… what would or could that look like? First, getting there. Second, the long wait while it is bio-terraformed. Then establishing viable ecosystems… and then finally establishing sustainable human colonies… whew ! Yeah… too long for most human organizations to manage….
Generation ships? Yeah, like that will be sustainable for the many thousands of years it will take… Which leaves us only…
Seed ships. But not any ol’ seedship because you can’t just plant a bunch of newly decanted human babies and expect them to survive in a wilderness… or even become properly socialized into a human culture using AI / robotics. No… we need…
Oh… just read the first book of my SciFi series “All The Stars Are Suns”…
This very point is the key plot driver of Roger Macbride Allen’s Solace trilogy.
Highly recommended, and good hard-sf.
Speaking of Venus’ crust… if the Hard Science Fiction Fairy replaced Venus’ atmosphere with one like Earth’s, the heat energy in the crust would toast it up real good, real quick. I don’t know how to math how long it would take the lithosphere to cool down enough to be habitable even if we were to turn the Sun off, but I’m betting it would be a good long time.
Because human endeavors may not stay organized over the long term of millennia, the key to terraforming may be to set it up as something that is not a single group effort. Figure out a way where individuals and groups do pieces and parts of the effort in ways that benefit them, as well as the common good, and it could get done.
Kind of like the destruction of our own planet by corporations that pursue the continued reliance on fossil fuels, only in reverse.
@6 It seems unlikely that we would make a major investment that would not pay off for several thousand years. Given a planet with water and an oxygen atmosphere, but no life on land, colonists, even if confined to habitats, might release organisms bred or engineered to local conditions. They could serve as food crops, attempts to stabilise local river banks or ecologies etc. Wait a few hundred years, and you could have a planetwide ecology. If there was no atmospheric oxygen, their plants would have to be engineered for an anoxic environment, but that does not sound impossible in principle.
The point is that whatever the colonists do, they are likely to change their environment in some ways. They will try to minimise effects that make their environment less habitable, and amplify effects that make their environment more habitable.
I don’t know if you could call that a terraforming effort, but over a few thousand years, it could have that effect.
Given that people have to live in the meantime, the timescale needed to terraform a planet means that the civilization doing it would have to be able to do equally well without it for centuries or millennia- while the work in progress would be a bottomless investment hole. For that reason a scenario that seems more plausible to me is the “Greenhouse” model: build one large domed habitat at a time as population expands, until you have roofed over the planet (or a very large contiguous portion of it) and then eventually consolidate this into a single giant ecosystem.This can become as Earthlike as local conditions (gravity, length of day) permit.
Several high intensity solar powered satellites with laser xray or microwaves or all or both if turned on for several years might be enough to cook of excess atmosphere on venus. After the atmosphere gets even hotter than now it could shed off atmospere into space. Then turn off the lasers. The thinner atmosphere should then cool off easier. Add some water from the moon or asteroids and voila. Start the terraforming processes on a cooler venus.
No mention of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy?
@mat: A Venus with Earthlike atmosphere and temperature–even if on the high end of Earthlike–and its current rotational speed could host an ecosystem of animals adapted to Saharalike temperature swings, but over a much longer period, combined with a midnight sun/noon moon fluctuation in daylight. Foxes might be the biggest predators on land, rabbits/hares the biggest herbivores.
Birds would be something else altogether. I read once that assuming shirtsleeve conditions on the Venusian surface, a fit person on a bicycle could see the sun move backward in the sky. Imagine species of birds that migrate east or west as soon as the subadults are ready to go, flying fast to land at just the right time of the long Venusian day to raise the next brood. Or albatrosslike birds that spend several years riding the winds in their favorite time zone before heading toward early morning to find a mate.
I think Iain Banks had it right: if you have the tools to terraform a planet in less-than-geological times, it’s easier (more elegant too according to Culture’s Minds…) to build custom-fitted space habitats.
First it’s more matter and energy efficient, second you obtain more comfortable environments, third you avoid the moral pitfalls of interfering with native life if present (and even if we seriously lack data, if I was a betting person I would bet that the more a planet is near a status of being easily terraformable, the more likely the chance of finding some local life already there).
I could see terraforming working as a kind of moral/artistic endeavor for a race of immortals: you live in comfortable custom space habitats, and create garden worlds with custom life or nurture worlds with barely surviving native life to enhance the chances of this native life to flourish, as a project to stave off long the boredom of milleniums…
Jens @13:
ISTR that Robinson’s Mars Terraforming Project took place over multiple decades, rather than millennia. Which is rather fast, to say the least.
Also, you still have the problem of Mars having no rotating metallic core. No core, no magnetic field. No magnetic field, hello huge amounts of solar and cosmic background radiation sleeting down to the surface. This would lead to squishy meatbags getting cancers all the time.
Terraforming is hard!
In the Expanse books, the terraforming of Mars has been going on for three generations, and is expected to last for many more.
Kim Stanley Robinson also dabbles with the terraforming of Venus in his book 2312 (which sort-of follows on from his Mars trilogy). In that book the colonists use a sunshade to reduce the temperature of the planet until all the CO2 freezes out and can be processed as a solid. In fact, given that the terraforming of various planets part of the plot in qmany of his books, I’m surprised that KSR wasn’t mentioned in the original article.
KSR’s Mars trilogy is kind of an unusual case in that the terraforming project they were originally planning to do would’ve taken an incredibly long time and was by no means guaranteed to work at all. What actually made the difference was a massive disaster that just happened to have some convenient effects. It’s a plot hand-wave that Robinson didn’t really bother trying to disguise, since one of the things he wanted to write about was how people might behave in a world that had been made from scratch over a couple of generations, rather than the physical plausibility of such a thing. At least that’s how I read it.
Surprised no-one’s yet mentioned Heinlein’s “Farmer in the Sky,” in which the terraforming of Ganymede appears to have taken place in scarcely a few decades, at most. I suppose that given when it was written (1950) it was based on what was considered plausible at the time. I suspect this may have been for many readers their first exposure to the concept in fiction.
As I recall, RAH also provided a BOTE estimate of how much energy would be required. It was not a small number but of course they had total conversion. Also food shortages for some reason.
I enjoyed John Barnes’ The Sky So Big and Black, where pioneers are terraforming Mars by hand, only to have the powers that be decide that redesigning people will be faster than redoing the whole planet.
I like the terraformed Mars of Babylon 5: you have to wear Antarctic gear and an air tank with a face mask and goggles if you to walk around outdoors, but the people are prosperous enough that you can take an elevated pneumatic tube transport instead.
There are several other things we would need to crack first in order to make terraforming feasible both in terms of science and economics:
– True AI
– Nano technology
– Cryogenics
– Better controlled nuclear fusion
Every single thing on that list is more likely to destroy humanity than not.
@23 How would cryogenics destroy humanity?
How would cryogenics destroy humanity?
Freezer burn.
@24, @25:
lol.
I personally think life extension of any form would destroy humanity in multiple ways. Maybe not eliminate the race of Man, but destroy what actually makes us human.
It should be pointed out that its the inevitable ubiquitousness of these things that would destroy us, not their discovery.
@19 One problem with Farmer in the Sky is the assumption that, once the world was warmed up, Ganymede was composed of pretty much the same stuff Earth was made of, in pretty much the same proportions. Actually, it appears to have enough water to cover the entire world in a deep ocean. So much for farmland…
@27,
Rice paddies?
#3 ellynne
I’ve seen them referred to as “hypercanes”, possibly from a Bruce Sterling novel.
@6, it is ever so much worse than you think. The best guess for the composition of the atmosphere of the early Earth was that there was at the very least as much CO2 as there is nitrogen now and probably many times more: there is no way that CO2 levels were less than thirty thousand times what they are now. Where did all that CO2 go? The carbon went into carbonate rocks and the oxygen went to oxidising exposed rock but mostly into oxidising an ocean-full of dissolved reduced iron. There are beds many kilometres thick all over the world that result from this process. Most did not stay in the atmosphere. The oxygen that is in the atmosphere today is but a remnant of this immense slow burning.
So take your estimate of time required and knock it up by at least thirty thousand — or find a lucky world with very different chemistry.
Terraforming is *hard*. (But one benefit of all this: even if we burn all the burnable stuff on Earth, oxygen levels will barely be dented. There’s a lot of it.)
Changing Venus’s rotation is easy: flybys do it. Changing its rotation *substantially* takes lots of flybys and/or relatively high mass ones (don’t miss) but IIRC is actually kind of doable. A stream of spacecraft transferring orbital momentum between two planets. Paul Birch wrote a bunch of papers on momentum transfer (also “dynamic compression beams”), hosted at the Orion’s Arm website. I don’t know if crust melting is even an issue. At any rate it’s an easier mechanism than sticking giant rockets on the crust or slamming rocks into it to give spin.
I forget how good the science was, but the Niven-Cooper _Building Harlequin’s Moon_ is exactly what it sounds like. They have to assemble the moon before they terraform it. Nothing 60,000 years in coldsleep[1] can’t solve…
[1] Possible problem with coldsleep less magical than stasis boxes or bobbles: DNA damage from the radioactive atoms in your own body, unmitigated by natural DNA repair processes.