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In the course of reading Tim Flattery's The Future Eaters for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.
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.
From:
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The thin south-east strip, where the majority of the Australian population lives today, is much younger land and did have volcanoes - my shire is advertises itself as "Lakes and Craters" for exactly that reason! The Great Dividing Range is where this younger strip joins on to the great, older part. (Even here, the topsoil is a maximum of 25cm deep and quite fragile.)
The far tropical north, which might be more relevant for terraforming, is unsuitable for European-style regular agriculture, but it's highly relevant to tropical African farming traditions, where the land is extremely fertile due to decaying vegetable matter, there's extremely high rainfall and tropical flooding, even though the soil underneath is just as poor as elsewhere. I don't think it would be so hard to simulate that in terraforming, if you could set up the water and suitable housing for the residents.
The only way the Game of Thrones farming practices would work for me is if the long winter/long summer system is relatively new for some magical reason, like less that 300 or so years old, meaning that they're in a transitional period and actually doing pretty badly.
From:
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So, the far north is probably suited to more of a silviculture of the style mentioned in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, where rainforest tree products were staples, several crops were grown together in small clearings to maximize benefits, and planting was done without plowing?
Game of Thrones drives me a bit nuts with the impossible agriculture *and* the way that GRRM has no sense of scale when it comes to time. The Night's Watch has been guarding the Wall for 8000 years? Because if you go back 8000 years in European history, you're in the Chacolithc -- human societies and human organizations simply don't last that long. Even human religions (which are just about the only things that I can think of that last for millenia) have changed significantly over the ages.
From:
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"Silviculture" is a great word! That's very much what's suitable for the far north: no plowing, no wide open fields; tree products, various yams and bananas are the staples. There are some rice-growing areas, but they're more on the wide flood-plains to the south of the rainforest.
Chinese and Jewish history go back pver 5000 years, but they're both highly literate cultures and that doesn't seem to be the case for Westeros at all, and, as you say, there's still a huge amount of change over that time. Unless there's super-long-lived dragons with a great interest in human culture and maintaining historical records, I will continute to treat GRRM's numbers with great suspicion, as I do with JK Rowling's!
From:
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Chinese and Jewish history do go back that far, but both cultures have lost institutions to time and cultural shifts, and both have things in their recorded history that the meanings of have been lost and had to be reinvented or worked around. GRRM created a world where there has been one institution that lasted 8000 years, which I just can't credited.
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And doesn't make any sense to me that settlers would come to a new world that was ready for human life, and immediately settle in a part that has only one growing season and a long frozen winter. You have a whole world to pick from! Why would you not go to Southern California?
I'm not sure about your trade scenarios, though. Never underestimate the willingness of life to strip-mine its own resources out from under itself... the endgoal seems to be to get rich enough by selling off your resources that you'll be able to buy them back from other people once you've run out. (economics? make logic sense?)
(and yeah, the more I learn about worldbuilding, the harder it is for me to find fantasy/SF worlds that I can read without cringing at.)
From:
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Yeah, people being people, colony worlds might indeed wind up mining their own soils into exhaustion, but hopefully they wouldn't do that *first* thing.
LOL, yeah, I keep critiquing SF&F novels on their lack of economics and ecological logistics. I'm getting awfully picky in my age.