The World is a fine Place and worth fighting for, I believe in the latter part. - Ernest Hemmingway, Andrew Kevin Walker

Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Charles Darwin: Building Better Worlds.

Terraforming, a concept familiar in sci-fi for decades now is rapidly coming into the mainstream. In fiction it has generally been shorthand for the alteration of planets for colonisation, forming planets to be more like Terra, Earth. In reality while it is brought up from time to time in relation to Mars the reason it is starting to move into public knowledge is that it is (and will increasingly prominently continue to be) Industry's favoured solution to climate change. Instead of cutting emissions or adapting to less polluting ways they instead want to continue as usual and hope that future science will magically fix things. The fact that the impact of climate change and dwindling resources will almost certainly lead to larger and larger wars and thus less chance for innovation in peaceful areas is irrelevant in their world. After all the quarterly financial report is all that really matters anyway.

However it seems terraforming has been around a lot longer than most people had assumed, back in the middle of the C19th Darwin, the Royal Navy and Kew Gardens botched together their own forest eco-system that turned a barren volcanic island into a lush expanse of greenery. But hey, creationists could've achieved something even better if they cared to pray hard enough.

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