Terraforming and the Hadal
Terraforming and the Hadal
Jim Comer·Saturday, 16 July 2016
I have decided that the Hadopelagic of Pendleton's World was never terraformed. I had read this.
https://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible...
and it had pointed out that hadal/hadopelagic fauna can’t be moved or kept in captivity even with 21stC technology. I knew that some creatures such as xenophyophora can’t be captured or transported even now, and, as such, are very hard to study.
I had ground this over in my mind, and had come to the conclusion that Pendleton’s has shallow seas, flooded continental crust in most cases, and that it has less abyssopelagic and hadopelagic terrain than Earth, Leslyn, Europa and so on. There are deeps in the oceans for two reasons: tectonic faults, such as created the Marianas Trench on Earth, and craters, abundant on Pendleton’s.
When the ramscoops arrived, Pendleton’s World was in the Cryogenian, and the two large continents were caked in ice, with an ice-covered ocean filling most of the sea basins. The tidal heat of the planet would have meant that the lowest chasms of the seabed were filled with liquid water, and a native biota inhabited the oceans and had made inroads on land-- the famous “Purple” (fa’aka), which resembles Earth’s Cooksonia.
The terraformers would have had an enormous job melting the ice caps on Pendleton’s, introducing tailored algae to thicken and oxygenify the air, and then building a biota throgh pantropy of Earth specimens: the animals and plants need to be able to breathe Pendleton’s air and drink the water, and concentrations of specific minerals will be different from those on Earth.
The ocean floor is simply out of reach without complex diving equipment such as bathyspheres. Who carries a bathysphere in a ramscoop?
The colonists had no interest in the hadal zone, either. Humans (with very few exceptions) don’t live on ocean bottoms, and the whole point of terraforming is to create a shirtsleeve environment, not to live in a dome under a black ocean. Save for mining (which is easier on the land surface) and science work, there is no reason to go to a seabottom chasm.
The Earth fauna of this region were a waste of space and were not imported; fauna will eventually evolve to adapt to the black ocean deeps, but this will take a long time.
Finally, humans derive no profit from the ocean abysses, with rare exceptions such as exploring wrecked ships. Human terraformers would have concentrated on the ocean surface and photic zone, where 90% of sea life lives.
Therefore the hadal zone is a refuge for native life forms unaffected by terraforming. We can expect this to continue for the foreseeable future.
This raises an interesting question about the very long-term fate of the Terran colony. We know that the colony survives for a minimum of some millions of years after its landing, and that the terraforming of the planet is metastable (that is, Pendleton’s does not revert to the Cryogenian as soon as the giant air conditioner wears out). We know that the teherrima (the giant slime mold things) are the most dangerous native creatures to humans and that humans also die from allergic reactions to fa’aka, the native cooksonia-moss. However, the majority of the land surface is terraformed and the teherrima are an intermittent threat at best.
If the native lifeforms of Pendleton’s are to take their planet back, the hadopelagic refugium is the natural starting point, since no human civilization has ever done more than send down a few robot subs to snap photos. Are the vent fauna and the starvelings of the bathybenthic going to wipe humans out or drive them off the planet?
The short answer: Not any time soon. I can see two boundaries for the event. Obviously, this might never happen. No one thinks that (on Earth) tubeworms or anglerfish are about to lunge from the deep and attack us. For one thing, pressure changes are fatal both ways. For another, they have no idea that we’re up here and would not care if they were told. For yet a third, abyssal fauna tend to be small and flabby, despite their horrible appearance. The same is true on Pendleton’s World.
So the longest time it could take is: it never happens. Humans are wiped out by meteors or plagues or some hellish climatic bobble, and the teherrima can go back to ruling the world, despite their obvious lack of a brain. But could it happen?
Well, it did, on Earth. Sea life (from the photic, not the hadal region, of course) did develop the ability to move on land, and, well, here we are. It took two hundred million years for this to happen on Earth, and so it might take that long for the bizarre things that are crawling around on the sea-floor of Pendleton’s to evolve, first into creatures that can tolerate the photic, then into land life on some remote reef, then into something that ends up xenoforming the continents. Note that I am not going to spell any of this out in detail, since I am not writing the past and future of Pendleton’s in the mind-numbing detail that it deserves; deep history is a fact in the Davis’ Star system.
So, what happens to the humans on Pendleton’s? Maybe, just maybe, their distantest descendants are wiped out by armadas of snot. Maybe they evacuate the place and then the slime takes over. Maybe it’s more complex than that.
Yes, I really do think about things like this.
Jim Comer·Saturday, 16 July 2016
I have decided that the Hadopelagic of Pendleton's World was never terraformed. I had read this.
https://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible...
and it had pointed out that hadal/hadopelagic fauna can’t be moved or kept in captivity even with 21stC technology. I knew that some creatures such as xenophyophora can’t be captured or transported even now, and, as such, are very hard to study.
I had ground this over in my mind, and had come to the conclusion that Pendleton’s has shallow seas, flooded continental crust in most cases, and that it has less abyssopelagic and hadopelagic terrain than Earth, Leslyn, Europa and so on. There are deeps in the oceans for two reasons: tectonic faults, such as created the Marianas Trench on Earth, and craters, abundant on Pendleton’s.
When the ramscoops arrived, Pendleton’s World was in the Cryogenian, and the two large continents were caked in ice, with an ice-covered ocean filling most of the sea basins. The tidal heat of the planet would have meant that the lowest chasms of the seabed were filled with liquid water, and a native biota inhabited the oceans and had made inroads on land-- the famous “Purple” (fa’aka), which resembles Earth’s Cooksonia.
The terraformers would have had an enormous job melting the ice caps on Pendleton’s, introducing tailored algae to thicken and oxygenify the air, and then building a biota throgh pantropy of Earth specimens: the animals and plants need to be able to breathe Pendleton’s air and drink the water, and concentrations of specific minerals will be different from those on Earth.
The ocean floor is simply out of reach without complex diving equipment such as bathyspheres. Who carries a bathysphere in a ramscoop?
The colonists had no interest in the hadal zone, either. Humans (with very few exceptions) don’t live on ocean bottoms, and the whole point of terraforming is to create a shirtsleeve environment, not to live in a dome under a black ocean. Save for mining (which is easier on the land surface) and science work, there is no reason to go to a seabottom chasm.
The Earth fauna of this region were a waste of space and were not imported; fauna will eventually evolve to adapt to the black ocean deeps, but this will take a long time.
Finally, humans derive no profit from the ocean abysses, with rare exceptions such as exploring wrecked ships. Human terraformers would have concentrated on the ocean surface and photic zone, where 90% of sea life lives.
Therefore the hadal zone is a refuge for native life forms unaffected by terraforming. We can expect this to continue for the foreseeable future.
This raises an interesting question about the very long-term fate of the Terran colony. We know that the colony survives for a minimum of some millions of years after its landing, and that the terraforming of the planet is metastable (that is, Pendleton’s does not revert to the Cryogenian as soon as the giant air conditioner wears out). We know that the teherrima (the giant slime mold things) are the most dangerous native creatures to humans and that humans also die from allergic reactions to fa’aka, the native cooksonia-moss. However, the majority of the land surface is terraformed and the teherrima are an intermittent threat at best.
If the native lifeforms of Pendleton’s are to take their planet back, the hadopelagic refugium is the natural starting point, since no human civilization has ever done more than send down a few robot subs to snap photos. Are the vent fauna and the starvelings of the bathybenthic going to wipe humans out or drive them off the planet?
The short answer: Not any time soon. I can see two boundaries for the event. Obviously, this might never happen. No one thinks that (on Earth) tubeworms or anglerfish are about to lunge from the deep and attack us. For one thing, pressure changes are fatal both ways. For another, they have no idea that we’re up here and would not care if they were told. For yet a third, abyssal fauna tend to be small and flabby, despite their horrible appearance. The same is true on Pendleton’s World.
So the longest time it could take is: it never happens. Humans are wiped out by meteors or plagues or some hellish climatic bobble, and the teherrima can go back to ruling the world, despite their obvious lack of a brain. But could it happen?
Well, it did, on Earth. Sea life (from the photic, not the hadal region, of course) did develop the ability to move on land, and, well, here we are. It took two hundred million years for this to happen on Earth, and so it might take that long for the bizarre things that are crawling around on the sea-floor of Pendleton’s to evolve, first into creatures that can tolerate the photic, then into land life on some remote reef, then into something that ends up xenoforming the continents. Note that I am not going to spell any of this out in detail, since I am not writing the past and future of Pendleton’s in the mind-numbing detail that it deserves; deep history is a fact in the Davis’ Star system.
So, what happens to the humans on Pendleton’s? Maybe, just maybe, their distantest descendants are wiped out by armadas of snot. Maybe they evacuate the place and then the slime takes over. Maybe it’s more complex than that.
Yes, I really do think about things like this.