Terraforming economics

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:15 AM

OK, I feel the need to balance last blog's guilty giggles with some grander thoughts. I've been thinking about the whole premise of the Firefly solar system, with the 500-years-from-now timeline and all those terraformed planets and moons.

How's this for a grand thought: 500 years? Emigration from a dying Earth-that-was, colonizing the first planet, establishing the melting-pot civilization, accumulating adequate wealth and resources to terraform another planet, and then actually transforming its entire atmosphere, ecology, etc? Times how many planets and moons? In 500 lousy years? Nah, I don't think so. Maybe 5000 years.

Here's my other grand thought: Terraforming a lifeless rock into even a harsh but survivable environment has gotta be incredibly expensive, requiring an enormous upfront investment before anything remotely profitable could be undertaken there. It would have to be undertaken by a large government or huge corporation. Whoever paid for it, they wouldn't be likely to then walk away and leave it open for whatever roughneck pioneers feel like establishing a stake. Yet by all appearances, this is precisely what we find on all the border worlds where Firefly does its petty-crime jobs. How does someone like Patience get her grubby little hands on an entire newly-terraformed world? Economically speaking, it is not making sense to me.

Suggestions welcome.

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