Hello everyone, I'm back, with nothing great to do except make a sequel/sequal to one of my old threads.

I was wondering, if we DID manage to terraform other worlds to make them suitable for our species to continue living, would we really care about how we treated them? Like, say we moved to Mars, would we be all precious about it knowing that anywhere is a potential home? And please, if you do reply, don't say 'Well yes we would because we'll have learnt from our mistakes on Earth', because I don't think that's in our nature as a species; especially when it gets to the stage when those born on Earth have all died and we're left with a generation that take terraforming for granted. I was just thinking about that, I would very much like to hear the thoughts of others on this rehashed subject? Thankyou

Ramadwarf on spoilt terraformers

[edit on 7-11-2009 by Ramadwarf Philes]

We would not care. I think you answered your own question when you told us

"And please, if you do reply, don't say 'Well yes we would because we'll have learnt from our mistakes on Earth', because I don't think that's in our nature as a species"

Depends if we invent inter-galactic travel by then. If we don't, eventually we'll run out of planets to terraform in our solar system O:

Well I don't understand how that could be here nor there. Once we have been able to figure out how to terraform a planet and moved on to Mars, or some moon after that. we would not need interstellar travel to save ourselves. We would need to remove all people from the previous planet and then terraform it again. So we move to Mars, (all of us) and we live there for 2000 years, Oh look our new planet is in jeopardy, lets move to the next one. and as we do setup the next one we could be setting up earth again. Kind of resetting the clock. Then oh look now we move to the moon for 2000 years. But after that we can move back to earth and have mars setup and ready for us. We will never again need to worry about climate and we can eat away all the resources of the planet and start mining other worlds. Then and Only then will we need to have interstelar travel in order to find resources, However by then perhaps we have met aliens or we could become like the aliens in independance day and travel the galaxy in a big ship to ravage planets we find that will substain our lives.

Why should we care about what happens to a planet that was a dead, mostly airless rock before we came upon it? That's still worse for us than it would be when we would no longer be able to live on it. It should be pretty obvious that life in general is a hardier sort than human beings in specific; stuff will live on in far worse conditions than we can.

The easiest way to go about things is to live entirely in space. Planets have resources, sure, but they're incredibly hard to get to. You need to mine through billions of tons of relatively useless crap like basalts and silicates to get anything we need. Asteroids and comets are much more resource-dense and a lot easier to manhandle to wherever we want them to be.

Terraforming is completely acceptable if you look at the universe as expanding and being perpetual.

Ideal terraforming would be as carefully done as possible. Preferably with a small force arriving to make sure the planet isn't raped and plundered but managed carefully. Extraction of valuable resources starts etc.

After the forward base is set up the main force of colonists arrive. From there you build up arcologies (massive, self-contained living areas) which mean you don't have a sprawl of buildings spread out everywhere. Then you have your industry gathering the resources.

As each planet and solar system is used properly another one will be available and there for us to use.

Earth is a mess from a planetary point-of-view because there are either too many people living here OR the resources and land space isn't being used correctly...
I believe that if you terraform a planet it should be done only if the previous planet you've left is completely or nearly abandoned. That means you've not got the mill-stone of sending supplies back to the home planet all the time.
I think that this is possibly what an alien race would do if it travelled around en-mass.

[edit on 17-11-2009 by WatchRider]