Takoma Park Folk Festival

The Takoma Park Folk Festival is from 10:30 am to 6:30 pm this Sunday. It's held on the grounds of Takoma Park Middle School, 7611 Piney Branch Road and there whill be free shuttled from the Takoma Metro station.

I'm probably going to be at the Tinsmith concert in the afternoon, if anyone wants to meet up.

Thinking about Terraforming and trade in SF...

In the course of reading Tim Flattery's The Future Eaters for the dc_nonfiction_bookgroup and Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations just because, I came to the conclusion that terraforming is not just harder that "Open Asteroid, Insert France" but that it might actually wind up being more along the lines of "Open Asteroid, Insert Australia", just minus the Everything Is Trying to Kill You venomous and/or aggressive fauna.

It really takes Flattery's description of European flora as weedy, invasive, and dependent on predictable climate and resource base to see just how much my assumptions of what is normal are assumptions. It's pretty strange that most of the agricultural plants I depend on have a life-cycle where everything is dormant or dead for a quarter of the year, and that nutrients are freely available.

Australia's native flora and accompanying, co-evolved fauna, are limited by two things that contribute to extremely limited nutrients -- the soils are poor because there are no volcanoes to scatter nutrients in eruptions, and no glaciation to weather the rocks -- two main factors in soil development. If you're writing an SF novel with terraforming, the lack of either of those things on a colony world would be a problem -- the lack of both would mean that Australian style flora might be all that was ever suitable, especially for an initial site without an European style climate.

This is also why I completely lost my belief in The Song of Fire and Ice world -- how does a feudal European-style society develop on a continent that has an El Nino-Southern Oscillation style climate? Because with the best of medieval farming techniques, it was still damned hard to harvest enough food to bring people safely through to the next harvest. If the time to the next harvest is unpredictable on the order of years, you don't adopt agriculture that is highly dependent on predictable seasons. You practice 'fire-stick' farming and live at much lower population densities, so that even if you have several terrible years in a row, you don't lose 50% of your population and gene pool to starvation. You also don't waste your neighbors in wars -- you're going to need them to stay with when your territory doesn't get any rain for two years and probably marry the next time famine shrinks your gene pool by 10%.

Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations gave me shivers about how easy it is to basically strip-mine the fertility out of soil with ill-considered agricultural practices (like, you know, plowing). Even if you could introduce some form of Terran-derived ecology on a new planet, you'd have a hard time not losing all the soil because erosion works about 100 to 1000x faster than soil formation from rock-weathering. Glacial till is a limited and possibly non-existent resource, as is volcanic soil, depending on how the planet is set up in your typical SF story...

Definitely the last thing you want to do in such a scenario is to start exporting your nutrients and minerals as agricultural products -- even though that's basically what Europe did to its colonies during the Age of Exploration, mined their soils. A colony planet would be wise to only trade volatiles, minerals, and nutrients (in commodity forms like wheat and rice) for other volatiles, minerals, and nutrients in a raw form that can be immediately funneled into their ecosystem. Trade between worlds in that case would be trades -- equal exchanges of molecules, and all the profit would be realized in disparities in man-hours of processing -- a grand piano is a load of carbon in a very specific and highly complex arrangement that requires thousands of hours of human effort, but if you're making them for export, the colony world really needs to replace all that carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous or they will have no more trees in a surprisingly short order...

Basically, the only thing besides information/data which I can see as being high value goods for interstellar trade would be musical instruments and other incredibly complex machinery that needs artisanal skills, foodstuffs that have terrior (and these would be extremely expensive), seed stocks/gene stocks for flora and fauna, human genetic material, and possibly pottery, depending on the existence of clay (which is formed in rock weathering and demineralization via leaching -- I am not a geologist, and have no idea how commonly this happens on exoplanets -- does Mars have clay? does the Moon?).

I'm generally having thinky thoughts and worldbuilding in what might be a space AU fanfic, or might spin off into an original SF novel.