Oarfish, which grow to to over fifty feet in length, are not "serpents" technically speaking, any more than a whale is a kind of fish. But that's an anachronistic viewpoint: the term "sea serpent" long predates any notion of scientific taxonomy. Had Aristotle been called upon to examine one of the creatures that washed up in California, he would unequivocally pronounced it to be a "sea serpent". And following the terminology of pre-Linnean natural philosophy he'd be correct.
This leads me to a science fiction trope that always bothers me, namely terraforming. Terraformed planets are usually depicted as being for all practical purposes Earth-like. Personally I have my doubts. Even if it is possible to terraform a planet there's one property Earth has that no human-designed replacement will ever match: the power to surprise us. And the more I think about that power, the more certain I am that terrforming is implausible, at least on a time scale of anything less than millions of years. The problem isn't whether or not the terraforming engineers choose to put oarfish, or yeti, or Megaprimatus kong on the new planet. It's matter of having all the things you'd need to make those things possible, things we don't understand because we take their effect for granted.
Take viruses. The majority of viruses have no known direct impact on human civilization, but that doesn't mean they haven't shaped the world we live in. Hantaviruses were not isolated and identified until the 1970s, but they've almost certainly been causing mysterious, unnamed diseases in humans and livestock for millennia. Once scientists knew about hantavirus, it turned out they weren't some exotic Korean aberration, they were all over the world, everywhere you find rodents. In fact local populations of rodents seem to co-evolve with strains of hantavirus, so that what is a routine, non-fatal infection for them is deadly to animals moving in from outside their range.
Local pathogenic organisms aren't just annoyances. They slow the infiltration of invasive, "weedy" animal species (e.g., rats or humans) into an area. This breaks up large biogeographical regions into a patchwork of distinct smaller habitats, places where the shy yeti may yet lurk.
So while at first you'd think that a terraforming engineer would simply leave out all the pathogenic organisms from his new planet, one of the major challenges he has might face would be to amass a sufficiently large collection of pathogens with which to stock his planet. In fact without magic, or a few million years of waiting for evolution to do its work, I'd say the task would be impossible.
Frankly, the notion of terraforming on the time scale of a human lifetime strikes me as well outside the bounds of credibility. Even a thousand years would not likely suffice to render a planet Earth-like, although it might suffice if all you're going for is "habitable". I've used terraforming myself in stories, but it's magic as far as I'm concerned -- more magical than even FTL travel. I think it more likely our species will achieve FTL communication, if not travel, than it is we will ever transform an alien world into a place we'd want to live.
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I can't remember any names, but there were a few stories around involving botched terraforming---something that didn't quite come out right. (One of Asimov's later novels dealt with how the artificial environments of some worlds mentioned in his earlier novels had fallen apart and the people forced to flee.)
The sudden appearance of these dead oarfish does make me worry about (1) what niche in our environment they occupied, (2) what displaced this relatively rare species, and (3) what effect this displacement is having on other species in the environment.
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Carl Sagan wrote about theoretical parameters and criteria for life emegence. Some of the most taken for granted features are as macroscopic as they are microscopic. For one, tidal forces of a satellite aid in microorganism waste flushing, directly. Without tides, every simple organism would have to develop another excrement process. Tides also revitalize estuaries. Mollusks depend on tides to flush food in on a flooding tide and flush wastes out on an ebbing tide.
The golden distance of a planet from a primary where dihydrogen oxide is largely liquid is in the ninety-three million mile range for a star like Earth's size and type G3. Appreciably more distant and colder and all water let alone other liquids like methane would be permanently frozen. Appreciably closer and hotter and no liquid water would exist, let alone an atmosphere containing breathable gasses. Do light chemistry characteristics also impact life beyond mere matters of ultraviolet and actinic radiation?
Mars isn't heavy enough to retain an appreciable atmosphere over long time spans. If Mars had an atmosphere similar to Earth's, it has long since boiled off. Geological processes replenish Earth's atmosphere at about the rate it boils off. Though lighter gasses' primordial quantities have long since diminished to trace amounts.
Axial tilt is another factor that may support life and life's emergence. Without seasons, weather patterns might be more or less stable to the point an ordinary state of untenable chaos perpetuates. Axial tilt contributes to heat radiation into space during winter and warming temperate lattitudes during summer. Polar ice caps and equatorial tropics drive the global water vapor and ocean current exchange between rotational wind zones.
A geologiocally active planet creates new uplifts that shape and reshape climate patterns and replace features eroded by weathering. If a planet no longer actively creates new uplifts, has no tectonic action, no core heating from gravity, magnetics, and radioactive decay, the planet would soon be lifeless, airless, and flat.
The Moon's influence on Earth is far more significant than mere tides. For one, the primoridal collision between Earth and the protoplanet that became our moon transfered metals into our planet's core, and exchanged rock types, mostly more basalt to Earth and more granitic rock to the Moon. Our oceans float on a thin but strong and heavy basalt crust. Our continents ride higher on a thick and light granite crust. Both Earth and the Moon had a more equal distribution of metals and rock types prior to the collision, though the Moon was smaller. Earth gained while the Moon lost constituents that support life.
Another feature of the collision is the Earth's slower rotational period. The Earth spun faster before the collision. Processes that resulted from the collision preceded further processes, that diminished harmful surface nucleotides as well as heavy metals, gold, silver, titianium, iron, and so forth. Formation of such simplistic matters as soil and the water cycle, desalinization and dealkanization of the soil that made the oceans salty and the land sweet, depended on cosmic events and from later the cometary bombardment that delivered water in abundant amounts to Earth.
I find the idea of terraforming far more complex than any fiction has thus far depicted. Cosmic rearrangement or the fortunate similarity to Earth's cosmic ideal situation is a prerequisite to terraforming, in my estimation.
Actually, I have an inspiration under development that is an as-yet unrealized story premise or motif. The motif has to do with the age of life in the cosmos. Humans are yet young in a cosmic time scale, about comparable to the characteristics of young adulthood.
quote:Originally posted by Robert Nowall: I can't remember any names, but there were a few stories around involving botched terraforming---something that didn't quite come out right. (One of Asimov's later novels dealt with how the artificial environments of some worlds mentioned in his earlier novels had fallen apart and the people forced to flee.)...
Can you be more specific? Robots and Empire (1985) [http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Empire-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0586062009/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382380425&sr=1-1&keywords=robots+and+empire+isaac+asimov ]ends with a partial nullification of a terrorist groups' "nuclear intensifier" that results in a slow increase in earth's background radiation (as initially depicted in Asimov's first novel Pebble in the Sky) pushing mankind off Earth and into space.
In Foundation and Earth (1986) [http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Earth-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553587579 ], the "loss of pressurization" on the world Melpomene is attributed to "climate change.
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Well, I've never seen *Firefly*, but it's on Netflix so I guess I'll have to check it out.
I think of terraforming two ways: (1) as a story element and (2) as a speculative technology.
As a story element, terraforming provides an Earth-like stage for action to take place upon. You can have oak trees and grizzly bears, and not have to create and explain some kind of alien megaflora and fauna (as C.S. Lewis does for Mars and Venus in *Out of the Silent Planet*). It is a source of employment (e.g. the protagonist in one of Dickson's Dilbia novels was a terraforming engineer). It can be a plot complication, as in my own novel THE KEYSTONE where the uninhabitability of a failed terraformed planet figures in the choices facing the characters.
I haven't seen Firefly, so I don't know what Whedon's concept of a failed terraforming job looks like; but since you've read THE KEYSTONE, Dr. Bob, you know that *my* idea of a botched job isn't just an unpleasant place to live. A bad terraforming job probably results in a planet that's positively uninhabitable. Some of the botched planets in the Keystone universe might evolve to become inhabitable over the course of millions of years, but they would not appear Earth-like to our eyes. They'd be more like the monstrous alien planets of adventure science fiction, disturbing because they're almost familiar.
The details of how terraforming might, or might not work is potentially fertile ground for hard-science fiction.
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By the way, the timescale on which terraforming takes places is bound to affect the choices of target planets.
Imagine, for example, that terraforming takes a hundred thousand years to complete. *Why* any civilization would attempt terraforming is an interesting story prompt in itself, but given the investment in time only prime candidates are likely to be chosen, because you're building to last.
But suppose the opposite extreme were true, that you could terrform a planet in the wink of an eye, as in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. In that case you might well choose to terraform Mars. The fact that it will lose its atmosphere in a million years wouldn't matter to you.
Heck, you could terraform the Moon. Maybe it would become uninhabitable in ten thousand years, but why would *you* care?
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The idea of trying to survive on a moon that is becoming uninhabitable because of failing terraforming could be the seed for more than one interesting story, I would think.
Maybe even a trigger for a writing challenge?
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Pretty sure it was Foundation and Earth---which I haven't read since then, I think. In The Caves of Steel and a couple other works, Asimov talks of "the Fifty Worlds," the worlds colonized from Earth and which now oppose it. It's some of these worlds that have degenerated and devolved into uninhabitability. One of the later Hari Seldon books deals with the refugees from one of these worlds, settled on the city-world Trantor.
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Trantor did not become uninhabitable in Harry Seldon's lifetime, but he predicted the mass exodus from the planet and the few who returned and/or remained upon it in his initial The Foundation Trilogy. They are not identified as descendants of the Spacer Worlds, however, although it is never excluded.
However, In Prelude to Foundation the "earliest" (though written late) Harry Seldon as protagonist novels, the descendants of the Space World Aurora occupy the Trantorian Administrative District of Mycogen.
As for terraforming gone right or wrong, we should mention the innumerable novels whose setting is Mars.
Respectfully, Dr. Bob
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: The golden distance of a planet from a primary where dihydrogen oxide is largely liquid is in the ninety-three million mile range for a star like Earth's size and type G3.
Just FYI, the standard scientific name for water is water. In fact that is a common trick question on General Chemistry exams. In all my years of studying and working as a chemist, I have only seen dihydrogen oxide or similar variants used in jokes. Water is just one of the exceptions where the common names of chemicals are officially used, other examples being ammonia and hydrogen peroxide.
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From a chemistry textbook test review: The isotope of hydrogen that contains two neutrons is?
deuterium
protium
dihydrogen
hydrogen
tritium
monoterium
Where and when I studied chemistry, the professors occasionally insisted on using water's chemical name for purposes of factoring chemical reaction equations in words rather than symbols and abbreviations and occasionally used the common names of compounds so that students were familiarized with them in use by other disciplines, like medicine, construction, farming, fine arts, household product names, or their historical names: muriatic acid, vitriol, saltpeter, table salt, guncotton, celluloid, bicarbonate of soda, soda ash, etc.
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I don't know where and when you studied chemistry. Perhaps he was old school. But chemists use the term water. You can call down to the chemistry department if you question my experience
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I had the benefit of chemistry professors male and female, young and old who made studying chemistry lively, bright, and entertaining, partly from delving into the discipline's history and culture. I also enjoyed the same personal touches from physics, astronomy, math, and social sciences professors, let alone reading, writing, editing, publishing, and criticism instruction.
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First of all, how was that a trick question?
Second of all, For others' benefit? To prove that I am a chemist? Look if people don't believe me, they can call their local chemistry department at any college. I was just trying to be helpful. I think it is a good lesson about research, about how you should talk to people who actually work in the field in question. Dihydrogen oxide sounds nice and scientific, but if your chemist character uses that term instead of water and not as a joke, it will be a red flag for anyone who has taken Chem 101.
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The kicker for me in a project I've been churning on is the microbes in the soil. The ones that decompose dead stuff and make all sorts of other life processes possible. I know that here on earth when those get destroyed it takes a long time for them to repopulate and make it possible for plants to grow. You make a good point about it being a long game and a short game.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: From a chemistry textbook test review: The isotope of hydrogen that contains two neutrons is?
deuterium
protium
dihydrogen
hydrogen
tritium
monoterium
Where and when I studied chemistry, the professors occasionally insisted on using water's chemical name for purposes of factoring chemical reaction equations in words rather than symbols and abbreviations and occasionally used the common names of compounds so that students were familiarized with them in use by other disciplines, like medicine, construction, farming, fine arts, household product names, or their historical names: muriatic acid, vitriol, saltpeter, table salt, guncotton, celluloid, bicarbonate of soda, soda ash, etc.
I was so annoyed with the quiz that I didn't fully read this post. The chemical name for water (H2O) is water. I understand that most of the common names aren't officially used for most chemicals, but water is one of the very few exceptions.
I seriously doubt all your chemistry professors got this wrong. I suggest you look over your general chemistry textbook in the section on nomenclature. I've never seen one that hasn't specifically pointed out that water is the IUPAC name for H2O.
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I was not showing off nor joking. I was only pointing out an error. I did not expect the response I got.
I found that quiz very insulting. I felt that it questioned my honesty, that extrinsic demanding that I prove that I was a chemist, and I really have no idea how he could've meant it any other way, so if I misunderstood, please explain it to me.
I find this ironic coming from your post Kathleen in another thread that says extrinsic doesn't do personal attacks because how is questioning someone's integrity not a personal attack?
I apologize to all for the derail. I am going to drop this and move on.
quote:Originally posted by Pyre Dynasty: The kicker for me in a project I've been churning on is the microbes in the soil. The ones that decompose dead stuff and make all sorts of other life processes possible. I know that here on earth when those get destroyed it takes a long time for them to repopulate and make it possible for plants to grow. You make a good point about it being a long game and a short game.
Yay! An on-topic post!
Maybe our thinking about what a terraformed planet would be like is too limited. What we usually have in mind is a planet so transformed that it can provide the full depth and range of ecological services that the Earth's biosphere does, and provide them on a planet-wide scale.
But what if we set our sights considerably lower?
Suppose the goal is to support a small, fixed population of humans indefinitely? We can choose a population figure as low as we want. Let's say somewhere between 1000 and 10,000, wherever you think the break-point is for avoiding inbreeding (that figure itself is a, er, *fertile* topic for speculation).
How might such a planet differ from a truly Earth-like planet?
To address your soil microbe issue, the terraforming engineers might choose to inoculate only a hundred thousand hectares of ground, instead of the 13.4 billion hectares the Earth boasts. They might even ship in a few thousand hectares of Earth soil for specialized uses, such as botanical gardens.
Perhaps this scenario could bootstrap a full-blown terraforming job, supporting the generations of engineers needed to complete the project.
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Thank you, Pyre Dynasty and MattLeo, for getting back on topic.
I have to try to clarify, however.
MAP, I did not see anything in your discussion with extrinsic as attacking you or as being personal about your knowledge. Maybe I'm dense that way.
I also did not mean to imply that I thought you were joking. My joke references were to what extrinsic posted.
extrinsic made the dihydrogen oxide "joke" and you called him on it. What I saw him doing after that was explaining his source for the "joke" and you taking it personally.
Again, maybe I'm dense, but I didn't see any of it as a reflection on you, as an expression of doubt in your qualifications, or as any kind of insult.
I'm very sorry you perceived it all that way.
Using "dihydrogen oxide" verged on "showing off" on extrinsic's part, but I took it as a reflection of people complaining that he uses too many big words (or at least, that's how I perceive their complaints). Maybe it wasn't a joke, but I took it that way.
Please forgive me for not understanding your concerns?
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Thanks for the clarification Kathleen. I really appreciate it. I'm more than happy to let this whole thing go. I'm sorry I even brought it up.
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I intended and meant an irony when I wrote "dihydrogen oxide," an overstatement intended to express a touch of whimsy. I could have as easily used dimonoterium dephlogisticate. I considered that, though that term has very little recognition potential in the context. Using a term that is at once sublime and absurd I thought would signal irony on its own. Perhaps stronger irony signals would have been appropriate and not seen as objectionable. Now that I've thought about it, perhaps an overall steampunk expession for the post would have been a stronger and clearer expression of irony.
Lets's see, a steampunk aesthetic about a moon's terraforming failing, the inhabitants upset about the short-sighted thinking of their technologically advanced ancestors. The inhabitants assign blame to the predecesors instead of fixing the problems. The hero advocates for an effective solution while the powers that be mire in the blame game. That's both a tangible and an intangible dramatic complication that I think would be timely, relevant, appealing, and substantive development for a medium-length short story.
I understand whimsical irony can unsettle sensibilities of persons who've expectations of respect for their passions and vocations. Outsider humor is also not often regarded kindly by insiders, either. No offense or personal attack was intended.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Lets's see, a steampunk aesthetic about a moon's terraforming failing, the inhabitants upset about the short-sighted thinking of their technologically advanced ancestors. The inhabitants assign blame to the predecesors instead of fixing the problems. The hero advocates for an effective solution while the powers that be mire in the blame game. That's both a tangible and an intangible dramatic complication that I think would be timely, relevant, appealing, and substantive development for a medium-length short story.
I like this scenario, but I'd change it slightly. The inhabitants don't blame the short-sighted thinking of their technologically advanced ancestors; they believe the ancestors could do no wrong. It's not the powers that be that are playing the blame game; government bureaucrats understand the problem, but are too averse to the political risks of dealing frankly with the public.
It's the various factions who play the blame game. Each pick picks its favorite scapegoat. The right wing blames radical subversives; the left greedy corporations. The church blames secular people for not being pious, and the non-conformist sects blame the church for not being pious enough.
The hero knows that the Moon was never meant to be a permanent habitation, but nobody listens to him. Then he discovers the existence of a MacGuffin; a recording of a meeting of the colony's leaders shortly after the Moon was settled. Surely people will listen to the wisdom of the revered ancestors. This sets off complications as each faction, and the government, tries to prevent the recording from coming to light. As long as the ancestors are mute they're the perfect authority to appeal to, but nobody with aspirations to power wants to hear what the founders really have to say.
Finally, the hero manages to set up a trick where the recording is played on every video screen on the Moon. The ancestors are revealed, and the result is: TWIST ENDING (you supply).
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While your retake is a potentially appealing possibility, I favor a scenario that is farther from this alpha world's political reality yet tangible and proactive for a single hero. An at once closer yet farther approach to expressing social commentary is I feel more persuasive. Readers looking in can feel they are not the targets of the commentary yet see parallels to current events beyond their control and ultimately feel events will resolve satisfyingly.
Tolkien's exotic secondary settings principle takes one step removed. I feel another step or two removed from real-world reality are called for. More than spatially and temporally, also a milieu where the culture's decline is caused by cynicism, apathy, and self-gratification, powerless to recognize the decline, let alone revitalize the culture.
The ultimate outcome may not be saving the culture at all, rather a revelation that the decline is inevitable and a personally costly compromise or sacrifice is the only course. Do the hero's folk emigrate or are they trapped, hunker down, and call down a cometary bombardment to replenish the atmosphere before it's too late? Might they take steps to solve the problems? Or might they discover the ancients had already planned for a timely cometary bombardment and here it comes, oh my!? Wait, why didn't they know to prepare for the bombardment? They were cynically naive and apathetic, ignoring the signs the hero picked up on.
posted
Of course it depends on what kind of story your shooting for. Your scenario is good for dramatic purposes; to create pathos or surprised delight.
I like to write humorous stories; in this case it would be darkly humorous.
I'll tell you what my twist ending would be: the ancestors are revealed as being divided into exactly the same kinds of petty, pointlessly squabbling factions that exist today. The ancestors have no answers, because the people in the past were never any wiser or more intelligent than people are today. In the end the approach the ancestors took was exactly the one that the hero has been fighting against all along. It is the politician's way: kick the can a little farther down the road and hand a bigger problem down to the future.
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I've noticed that social satire has potential for audience alienation as well as audience appeals. More importantly, social satire by itself has narrower audience number potentials. Downplaying social satire and foregrounding personal struggles with satisfying outcomes has larger audience appeal potentials than foreground social satire.
Social satire doesn't in and of itself lend itself to conflict resolution outcomes, the sort of story type that appeals most broadly. Revelation outcomes, that social satire does lend itself to, run the risk of making readers the butt of a joke or the criticized subject of the satire. Poetic justice outcomes, similarly, that point out readers' frailties and flaws run the risk of alienating audiences.
Conflict resolution outcomes appeal most broadly because they serve to give readers a sense of completeness, of security in an unsecure world, and that despite worries all will turn out okay. These cultural functions of literature help audiences cope with their own life's struggles.
Might the idea then of a failing atmosphere to resolve indirectly reflect concerns about global warming? That a cometary bombardment is the dramatic solution to a failing atmosphere might signal how macrocosmic global warming issues and solutions are.
posted
Now my brain is going down a path of finding another planet already remarkably like earth but showing itself to be the older of the two. This leads to a revelation that the earth was the imperfectly terraformed one which explains the issues that lead people to seek another world in the first place.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: I've noticed that social satire has potential for audience alienation as well as audience appeals.
I do believe you are right. My experience in contests tells me that some readers love satire, others don't care for it, and a few just don't get the point. The ones who don't get it are the most painful; I'm standing there with pie on my face and whitewash down my pants, and all they can say is, "Isn't that uncomfortable?"
(Note -- I'm poking fun at myself here; my humor isn't *that* broad, but like most humor it relies on discomfort.)
quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Might the idea then of a failing atmosphere to resolve indirectly reflect concerns about global warming? That a cometary bombardment is the dramatic solution to a failing atmosphere might signal how macrocosmic global warming issues and solutions are.
Possibly, although I'm wary of writing that tries too hard to be topical. I regard stories like Star Trek's *Omega Glory* with a kind of horrified fascination, bordering on admiration. How could any writer produce something so utterly devoid of ironic self-awareness? It's almost titanic in its obviousness.
This gets to some of the double-bind issues you raised elsewhere. People expect other people to have a certain level of complexity; to be conflicted and have hidden agendas and what-not. And so a story to be credible at all has to have some ironic complexity. I think my reaction to *Omega Glory* is an instance of the uncanny valley. It looks like a story, but it only has the semblance of life. It's *undead*, like the old-school vampires in Bram Stoker's Dracula. You peel back the story to reveal the writer's soul, and there's nothing there but what's on the surface. It feels wrong.
Anyhow, I think there's something more basic in stories of apocalyptic doom than eco-topicality. I think they're about individual mortality. We face our personal deaths; if we defeat that technologically, we face the transition of our sun to gas giant. If we defeat even that, we face the entropic death of the universe, which renders the very tools we might use to extend our lives impotent.
Immortality is a mystical desire that has no possible material satisfaction. I think that universal experience of wanting what we can't have is what makes apocalyptic stories fascinating, although potentially repellent to some.
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quote:Originally posted by Pyre Dynasty: Now my brain is going down a path of finding another planet already remarkably like earth but showing itself to be the older of the two. This leads to a revelation that the earth was the imperfectly terraformed one which explains the issues that lead people to seek another world in the first place.
I love this idea, but the challenge I see is showing that there could be a planet *better* suited to supporting human life than the Earth is. The Earth really is a paradise; our problems with it are largely a matter of our own shortcomings, I think. We force poor people to live in flood zones in Bengladesh, then curse nature when they're swept away in a typhoon.
You can create a better planet in fantasy of course, where the lion lies down with the lamb and what-not. Doing it in science fiction is a heck of a tall order.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Might the idea then of a failing atmosphere to resolve indirectly reflect concerns about global warming? That a cometary bombardment is the dramatic solution to a failing atmosphere might signal how macrocosmic global warming issues and solutions are.
Possibly, although I'm wary of writing that tries too hard to be topical. I regard stories like Star Trek's *Omega Glory* with a kind of horrified fascination, bordering on admiration. How could any writer produce something so utterly devoid of ironic self-awareness? It's almost titanic in its obviousness.
This gets to some of the double-bind issues you raised elsewhere. People expect other people to have a certain level of complexity; to be conflicted and have hidden agendas and what-not. And so a story to be credible at all has to have some ironic complexity. I think my reaction to *Omega Glory* is an instance of the uncanny valley. It looks like a story, but it only has the semblance of life. It's *undead*, like the old-school vampires in Bram Stoker's Dracula. You peel back the story to reveal the writer's soul, and there's nothing there but what's on the surface. It feels wrong.
I think more so a double bind realized as reconciled through skewed expression. Not as current event topical meaning and relevance directly given, as sufficiently removed that only a very close reading interpretation reveals parallels. Any given reader decides for the reader's self-satisfaction relevance for the self.
Take faster-than-light travel motifs. Do they have real-world parallels and relevance for their audiences? FTL travel taken as equivalent to Conestoga wagons, Irish coracles, Viking longboats, Dutch East Indiamen, whatever method of travel carries adventurers to untamed frontiers, the need for wild, exploitable places as destinations for a prodigal hero's struggle for realizing fame and fortune ambitions.
What is this urge based upon functionally? The home community isn't sufficiently satisfying for identity forming and building and status developing. A method for standing out from the horde, for rising in status is called for, be it increased physical, fiscal, social, intellectual, spiritual, or cultural mobility for overtopping peers' status, perhaps for acquiring mating dominance favors. The masculine trait of status competition conducted away from the domestic setting, though, is a pecking order contention among a masculine cohort, not per se for feminine favor. This is a young male adult through early adult phenomena and perhaps into young middle adult, hence natural detaching from the familial natal creche that is Earth to struggle heroically and attain respectable status among a male cohort.
Might then terraforming represent male humans' insatiable need for taming and exploiting new wild places abroad? What then does a failed terraform represent? A return to wildness readymade for retaming and new exploitation, ripe for status development?
The action I'm seeing for a failing terraform is just such action, though, intangibly skewed, also about global warming as well as social satire portraying a head-in-in-the sand cultural mentality. But the literal, tangible action is foremost so that the message is not preached and is "As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind --"
Emily Dickenson "Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant" second stanza.
First stanza: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise"
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