Biological terraforming

[ExChairman (OP)]

I have been wondering about the terraforming, by adding or subtracting certain gases makes a world habitable... Ok for our breath maybee but what about bugs, not to mention alien bugs...

How about a tech tree in biological: Biological terraforming, not sure how to solve it. Maybee give a world a percentage that has to be within a tolerance for the terraforming species.

[Shipright]

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,6383.0.html

 

I gave this some thought as well.

[Starmantle]

I don't think I quite understand the impact this would have.

I mean - there's already genetic engineering, but you're talking about the impacts of terraforming on wildlife?

The current terraforming system is complicated in a sense (building air pressure, percentages of oxygen, temperature concerns, filtering out toxic gasses, a nod to melting ice caps and other caps related to gravity, etc.), but reducing the actual task of terraforming to just adding and subtracting gasses has always seemed a little simplistic to me.

I think about things like the Red Mars trilogy: introduction of plant life as a means to terraforming (just another way to swap those gasses, really), orbital mirrors, tapping into geothermal deposits, etc, etc.  Terraforming could be so much more interesting!  Though figuring out exactly what that would look like outside of Sol... well, it's a little hard for me to imagine implementing it all.  But exciting!

[Starmantle]

Oh - and I liked your post, Shipright!

[alex_brunius]

That's a great suggestion Shipright. I would like to add that a large human population in itself is often negative to biospheres health and not only factories. Especially so since most factories dealing with daily non-TN consumer goods needs are abstracted away to this population metric and into the "Service" slice of population allocation. This also goes for infrastructure, if you start bringing in loads of bulky infrastructure for millions to shield from temperature/gases the biosphere will suffer.

Combined with my suggestions for planet population capacity I think these would add a lot of context and diversity to the different planets we can colonize. Biosphere would of course also be an important metric in determining if a body is "close to optimal race conditions"

I would love to see an improvement for Population growth and spread mechanics.

Suggestion:
Add a new value called something like Natural Population Capacity for planets, based on how close they are to optimal race conditions and actual available area size of the body. Geological activity and % water would subtract from the available area effecting this negatively. This could also effect terraforming so that even if average temperature is 30 deg too high/low outside the acceptable interval there will still be a few areas (perhaps 2% max area) that can be settled with colony cost 0, so the actual colony cost is set to 0 but with a very low population capacity until average temperature is closer to race optimal. Everything above the cap is treated as normal requiring infrastructure.

This value is supposed to model how many people can comfortably live on a body without major infrastructure investments (modelling "normal" buildings fairly close to ground level and fairly spread out with a good percentage left for farming and industry/jobs for everyone).

For Earth it would probably be a 2000-6000 million (we have infrastructure today and are not living sustainable with food for everyone), but for bodies not perfectly terraformed or smaller, for example Mars (0.28 of earths area) or even smaller inhabitable moons it would be much lower.

If we say 4000 million for Earth it would be less then 1000 million for all Jovian moons as an example.

Growth % would be a function of how far from this cap you are.

Basically the mechanic means there is a cap on how big population can enjoy col cost 0 without infrastructure, but you can still always use infrastructure (at say cost one or two) to go above it if you want.

I'm not sure if odd gravity should influence how many that maximum can live on a body, perhaps high gravity should at least influence it negatively.

[Shipright]

I agree that there should be a population cap but I think it should be able to be increased by a variety of techs. One of the ways you could pseudo force a population cap is by having the size of the human population limit the amount of biomass a planet can support, with the penalty scaling for the same population on smaller worlds. This would simulate the actual physical space human cities and development take up regardless of the utopian level of technology. Essentially there is no population cap but if you build an ecumenopolis you have in effect reduced the biomass and thus biosphere to zero with follow on effects, on being nobody will want to live in your ecunemoplos!

As for population hurting the biosphere this is sort of taken care of by having facilities actually emit atmosphere changing gases which based on the rate of atmospheric change would alter biosphere health.

[alex_brunius]

Biomass however can as you pointed out be located in the oceans (algee and fish). If 95% of a body is water it could house an extremely large and rich ocean biomass but still have very little room for humans to live on without infrastructure (representing underwater habitats).

I disagree that human population cap should increase with tech since it's a human factor. Perhaps through genetic engineering conditioning you to be comfortable in less space...
The neat thing with my suggestion is that population cap is a softcap since it can be raised by infrastructure, and infrastructure production is actually increased through techs already! (both construction speed and civilian infrastructure production).

As for population hurting the biosphere this is sort of taken care of by having facilities actually emit atmosphere changing gases which based on the rate of atmospheric change would alter biosphere health.

What I'm trying to argue here is that it's mostly the humans/populations them self that do this (through consumer goods, non-TN production, waste, transportation, services and so on), not them working in facilities like say research labs or orbital shipyards...